Students walking on campus in summer
Enterprise Resource Planning impacts all areas of Virginia Tech's business operations, from facilities to finance. Photo by Becca Finch for Virginia Tech.

Virginia Tech first adopted the Banner enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform in 1997. Over time, we have made numerous customizations to the “out of the box” Banner product to meet changing needs for finance, human resources, student services, and more. 

These customizations, while initially addressing specific organizational needs, have resulted in outdated code that has become hard to maintain over time. Moreover, as Ellucian, the parent company of Banner, is moving its product exclusively to the cloud, any customizations to the legacy product will no longer work properly. 

Thus, for Enterprise Systems, much of FY 2024 was spent on efforts to remove customizations from our on-premise Banner ecosystem — and consequently, eliminate the need to continue servicing these customizations — in preparation for a move to Banner in the cloud, and while we consider our long-term plan for modernizing our ERP resources across the board.

During the 2024 spring semester, the Human Resources and Finance modules within self-service Banner were upgraded from Version 8 to Version 9. This work reduced cybersecurity risks, decreased maintenance costs, and provided a more modern user interface. 

These efforts further stabilize the Virginia Tech technical environment and position us to study available ERP solutions to identify the best approach to meet our future needs.