In close collaboration with our colleagues from the Finance department, the NWU became the first South-African University to successfully implement the Kuali Financial System (KFS), to replace our previous vended system from Oracle.

KFS is an open source financial system, collaboratively developed by several international universities, and used by institutions like Cornell, Indiana University, the University of California, and more than 20 other universities. Because it is developed by universities, and for universities, it has a much better functional fit on the higher education business model than commercial solutions, and will bring about considerable savings compared to a vended solution.

The implementation project started in 2013, touched more than 70 business processes and required integration with ten other administrative systems. It must be noted that the integration was completed in a much shorter time and a much lower cost as the accepted norm, because it was handled through our SOA architecture - another strategic first for the NWU in South African higher education. IT has been following the SOA architecture principles as integration strategy since 2004, and it again provided us with substantial agility and value in the KFS project.

We are proud to announce that the implementation of the Kuali Financial System (KFS) took place on 5 January 2015 without any glitches.

17 July 2015