JMU Partners with Tambellini for Value-Focused, Risk-Resilient ERP Modernization

“Tambellini provided us with details on what solutions other institutions of similar profile had selected. They also provided detailed estimates of the staffing needs for ERP modernization and anticipated associated costs for those resources, including backfill. This saved us significant time on research, and their broad connections across higher education resulted in more comprehensive data and deeper insights than what we could have gathered on our own.”

Robin Bryan
Chief Information Officer and AVP of Information Technology, JMU

James Madison University

Established in 1908, James Madison University (JMU) is a public research institution located in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and part of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s higher education system. The university offers 139 academic programs at bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels, serving 21,112 undergraduate and 1,767 graduate students. JMU employs approximately 4,000 faculty and staff, united in a shared commitment to preparing students to become educated, enlightened citizens who lead productive and meaningful lives.

Reengineering Madison Transforms Campus Operations

Since 2022, JMU has been actively engaged in Reengineering Madison, its enterprise-wide collaboration focused on modernizing and optimizing core campus technologies, functions, and business processes. Reengineering Madison is providing the infrastructure and data for university staff and faculty to operate more efficiently, coordinate effectively across departments, and take advantage of greater flexibility, freedom, and innovation in how they engage with and support students. JMU distilled its vision for Reengineering Madison to four goals:

1. Improve student success outcomes.
2. Develop shared data systems as a university good.
3. Increase operational efficiency at all levels of the university.
4. Strengthen JMU’s relationship and communications with all constituents.

This bold and comprehensive multiyear transformation plan is facilitating several major technology platform implementations. JMU’s recent milestones have included rolling out an enterprise constituent relationship management (CRM) system and implementing a modern identity and access management system. As a Tambellini Group client since 2018, JMU has engaged with Tambellini throughout the Reengineering Madison initiative to support campus teams, with activities including:

• Building a 10-year budgetary model to guide investment planning and execution for Reengineering Madison.
• Delivering a market overview presentation to the Reengineering Madison steering committee. The overview shared highlights from Tambellini’s most recent data and analysis on the higher education technology market, including recent ERP, student system, CRM, integration, and security solution selection trends.
• Providing detailed higher education market research on trends related to CRM solutions leveraged at public institutions (with similar characteristics to JMU) for recruiting and admissions, advising and retention, advancement, and student engagement.
• Supporting the Reengineering Madison steering committee with in-depth insights into:
  • The current state of the higher education enterprise technology market.
  • Product selections other similar higher education institutions have made for student, finance, and human resources/human capital management (HCM) systems.
  • Navigating the complexities of enterprise technology replacement, including managing the change and maximizing outcomes for the organization.

With a strong foundational understanding of the current enterprise technology market and its organizational opportunities and challenges, in 2024, JMU prepared to replace its existing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) platform—including systems for finance, human capital management, and student administration.

JMU Seeks Advisory Services for ERP Modernization

JMU took a collaborative approach to ERP modernization, engaging its community early and highlighting the broad implications of replacing its core systems. Stakeholders identified that, above all, the new platform must be flexible, adaptable, and prioritize continuous student-centered innovation.

Given the complexity of university ERP transformations, JMU sought external expertise and support in identifying the best-fit technology solution, followed by identifying a well-aligned implementation services partner. JMU gathered ERP stakeholders and developed a formal request for proposal (RFP) to engage an external partner to provide ERP advisory services, including:

• Conducting a comprehensive assessment of institutional needs and aligning them with current market offerings.
• Evaluating and selecting ERP solution providers and products.
• Evaluating and selecting an implementation services partner.
• Negotiating contracts to procure an integrated cloud ERP platform and implementation services partner.

Tambellini’s Tangible Returns are a Differentiator

JMU undertook a competitive selection process, reviewing advisory services proposals from multiple firms. Tambellini stood out for its reliable track record of providing finance, human capital management, and student information systems research, assessment, evaluation, and negotiation assistance that supported successful modernization initiatives at several public institutions and university systems. The measurable benefits client institutions gained from working with Tambellini included time savings and cost reductions. For example, Tambellini highlighted the following outcomes:

• Tambellini has helped its client institutions shorten their solution evaluation, selection, negotiation, and procurement processes by an average of six to twelve months. The time savings was achieved by aligning decision-makers around the market differentiators that matter most, based on each institution’s specific requirements, timelines, and priorities.
• In two recent negotiations, Tambellini saved each institution nearly $10 million dollars during the initial contract term after the vendor’s best and final proposal.

JMU Builds on its Trusted Relationship with Tambellini

In addition to valuing Tambellini’s impactful work with other institutions and strong RFP response, JMU’s confidence in the firm was reinforced by its longstanding partnership as a Tambellini client since 2018. Robin Bryan, Chief Information Officer and AVP of Information Technology at JMU, explains, “Tambellini is like another member of our technology team at JMU. Our Tambellini partners have developed a deep understanding of JMU’s institutional culture and stakeholder dynamics. We value how they provide fresh perspectives from their broad research and collaboration with institutions and solution providers, while tailoring their guidance to JMU’s unique context.”

From Tambellini’s previous work and RFP response, it was clear JMU could count on Tambellini to ground the university’s ERP assessment and selection process in inclusive engagement with stakeholders and teams across the university to align staff, faculty, and student goals with strategic technology. Following a thorough evaluation of the submitted proposals, JMU elected to strengthen its existing partnership with Tambellini by engaging its ERP advisory services.

Community Input Drives JMU’s Strategic Investments

Tambellini collaborated with JMU to facilitate a people-first approach to selecting strategically aligned ERP solutions and an implementation services partner with milestones that included:

Assessment and Market Alignment

Process: This phase was dedicated to facilitating executive and project team alignment by meeting with leaders and stakeholders, providing overviews of the current market trends for solution and implementation partners, and gathering campus stakeholder feedback to benchmark JMU’s current operational state and future goals across participants through:

• Tambellini’s proprietary Future Campus™ assessments focused on data management, HCM, finance, and student operations.
• Interviews with executive and operational leaders.
• Tambellini-facilitated workshops to clarify and validate JMU’s ERP replacement priorities with executive and operational leaders across the project’s scope areas.

As Bryan describes it, “Tambellini provided us with details on what solutions other institutions of similar profile had selected. They also provided detailed estimates of the staffing needs for ERP modernization and anticipated associated costs for those resources, including backfill. This saved us significant time on research, and their broad connections across higher education resulted in more comprehensive data and deeper insights than what we could have gathered on our own.”

Outcome: Comparing the extensive community input with Tambellini’s research on current vendor and product offerings and roadmaps, Tambellini helped JMU match its requirements with the capabilities of the available market solutions and services.  Tambellini’s final report included JMU’s RFP-ready differentiators and detailed solution and partner requirements.

Evaluation and Selection

Process:

• Bryan describes how Tambellini kicked off the evaluation and selection process: “After gathering campus feedback during the assessment, Tambellini recommended and facilitated vendor discovery sessions for the JMU community before scheduling the product demonstrations. These sessions allowed university stakeholders to explore the capabilities of modern SaaS ERP systems, laying a strong foundation for them to confidently evaluate products during the demonstration phase.”
• Tambellini worked with JMU’s procurement team to release its ERP solution and implementation services partner requirements overviews. These were released instead of RFPs, as JMU was selecting from vendors that were already available through cooperative contracts.
• Tambellini scheduled vendor demonstrations and worked with JMU stakeholders to develop the vendor and implementation partner demonstration agendas, functional demonstration requirements, and rubrics to evaluate vendors and implementation partners.

Summarizing the evaluation and selection process, Bryan says, “JMU benefited greatly from working with Tambellini on our ERP replacement project. Tambellini brought vast knowledge to our process throughout every stage of our work together. Their assessment of our needs combined with their knowledge of the higher education industry streamlined what would have been an extensive process in determining the applications that would meet our needs. Tambellini helped us analyze vendor responses objectively, which greatly reduced the time it would have taken us to do an appropriate comparison on our own.”

Outcome: With strong institutional consensus and a clear strategic vision, JMU selected a cloud ERP platform that included modules for human capital management, financial management, student administration, and budget and financial planning. Following the identification of JMU’s preferred ERP platform vendor, JMU also evaluated and selected a higher education-experienced implementation services partner.

Negotiation of Product and Services

Process: Tambellini led the alignment of business agreements and cost negotiations with JMU’s selected solution provider and implementation services partner, including:

• Analyzing vendor platform recommended solutions and JMU’s requirements and aligning the solution set to best meet JMU’s needs.
• Analyzing and aligning the implementation partner’s statement of work to ensure it comprehensively supported a successful implementation, while eliminating unnecessary expenses and commitments.
• Partnering with JMU’s procurement team and project team for the vendor bidding and negotiation process and offering specific recommendations to strengthen JMU’s position.
• Collaborating with JMU’s procurement leaders to manage and lead negotiation meetings between JMU and its solution provider and implementation partner.
• Providing guidance on business and legal terms and conditions and negotiating optimal agreements.

“Tambellini’s understanding of our needs and the capabilities of the vendors saved the university significantly from a funding perspective. They were able to negotiate contracts with both the software vendor and the implementation partner that reduced our overall costs for years to come. The expertise that Tambellini brought to bear has positioned JMU to be very successful in this effort,” says Bryan.

Outcome: JMU received signature-ready contracts from its vendor and implementation partner, approving and signing them by May of 2025.

JMU’s Cloud Transformation is Embedded in a Robust Support System

In July 2025, JMU chose to purchase a five-year Tambellini subscription add-on package, which includes monthly engagement with their Tambellini executive advisor, dedicated analyst, and strategic advisor for ongoing support through the extensive cloud platform implementation. Bryan and her team are confident that Tambellini’s advisors will help them apply best practices and industry standards in a way that resonates with JMU’s values and operational style.  

“Tambellini’s services have supported our most critical needs in preparing for ERP modernization, which has created space for the JMU team to focus on the important decisions and meaningful tasks that create a strong foundation for successful enterprise transformation. Tambellini added value at every stage, not only saving us time, resources, and money, but also providing insights and guidance on areas we hadn’t even considered, despite our years of experience in higher education technology.”

“Tambellini added value at every stage, not only saving us time, resources, and money, but also providing insights and guidance on areas we hadn’t even considered, despite our years of experience in higher education technology.”

“Further, Tambellini’s guidance allowed us to benefit from all that has gone right and wrong at other institutions who have approached similar work. Their resourcing analysis and recommendations gave us the evidence we needed to make the case to leadership for appropriate resourcing for our work, and this will continue to provide us increased capacity as we proceed with the implementations,” says Bryan.

JMU began implementing its cloud ERP solution in July 2025 with plans to launch its finance, human capital management, payroll, and budget planning platform in July 2027. The university team plans to begin its student system implementation in July 2027, rolling out integrated data analytics by December 2027.

Photo courtesy of James Madison University