San Joaquin Delta College

Prior to implementing Kuali, San Joaquin Delta College was using an older version of a proprietary system that users found outdated and cumbersome. Realizing their legacy finance system was not operating effectively with perpetual patches, Delta College began a gap analysis of alternative financial systems and found the Kuali Financial System. Delta began its transition to KFS with a specific goal of achieving something that could be shared with other institutions, particularly community colleges.

The San Joaquin Delta College implementation team provides the following recommendations to those implementing the Kuali Financial System:

• Create a through and comprehensive fit-gap analysis as you begin implementation. It is essential to have a perspective for what must be done and how the pieces will come together to complete the implementation.
• Create resource contingency plans from the beginning. If a critical staff member were to leave, or the state were to experience an unprecedented fiscal crisis, what then?
• Teach functional project team members how and when data manipulation can be easily automated. This prevents time being wasted with manual data entry or clean-up that could have been automated.
• Engage a commercial partner. We absolutely could not have implemented Kuali without the assistance of rSmart.
• If you are a community college, consider the Kuali Financial System. We believe that it is the best finance system available for community colleges.