Work in progress - A collaborative ERP configuration project: Preparing engineering students for the global economy

Calls from the industry to reform engineering education have been consistent through the past decades. The clear message is that graduates not only need to possess sound technical knowledge in their chosen disciplines but also need to be better educated in the areas of communication skills, teamwork, leadership and other professional skills. Despite of the recognized importance, it is not easy to develop and implement a curriculum that fosters such skills. Also, subsequent outcome assessment of the achieved skill levels poses many challenges and demands much creativity. This paper describes a joint experience between Syracuse University in USA and Carlos III University in Spain. The context is the education of engineering students in fundamental business processes and integration using an industry-scale Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Groups of multinational engineering students from the two schools carried out a project of developing an executable ERP system using various distributed collaboration tools. Findings from this experience are discussed and other on-going efforts are described in this paper.