As it looks to upgrade its legacy big iron ERP system, the public school system in Toledo, Ohio, is also eyeing the resurrection of a US$4.3 million PeopleSoft Inc. accounting and human resources software installation it had abandoned five years ago.

The Toledo public school district needs to do something with the quarter-century-old ERP mainframe system, which still relies on a clumsy green screen interface, said chief business manager Daniel Burns. He would like to see it replaced outright, or at least Web-enabled with a menu-based interface to help automate tasks like processing paper-free purchase orders.

"You want to do it right and identify your risks and make sure you identify your costs," Burns said. That includes "not just the software purchase, but the training," he said. "And you have to ask if you have to bring in additional employees or release employees during the implementation."

One of the main drivers behind an outright replacement of the system is the fact that the mainframe"s programming is partially in Cobol, so it"s difficult to find staff to support the system. Burns intends to devise two potential solutions. One might involve throwing an easy-to-use Web-based front end on the mainframe system, hiding the back end"s complexity from users. Another possibility is that the school system could keep that new GUI even as it swaps in a third-party ERP application running on Windows NT and an Oracle database.

That would keep any future move to a new system transparent to the users.

In the long run, Burns said he would like to implement a joint human resources and financials ERP backbone that could transmit student enrollment information seamlessly between those two systems. In addition, he said he"d like any new system to support reporting and remote access and be capable of extracting human resource information, such as a teacher"s profile, and placing it on the Web for public review.

Since the Toledo school system has already spent millions of dollars on PeopleSoft software, there could be an advantage to resurrecting the earlier implementation.

In 1998, the district paid $2.6 million for the vendor"s accounting and human resources software and another $1.7 million to an integrator for the actual rollout. However, budget cutbacks in 1999 killed the project. The district still owns the software, and the only way to recover its investment is to try installing it again. But doing that isn"t necessarily a given, Burns said.

"I"m not going to rule out rule out other applications," he said.

Whatever the Toledo school system does, the plan presented to the superintendent of schools will have to show cost savings that justify any new expenses. Burns said he would also consider staggering the implementation, installing one application at a time.

It"s not uncommon for past multimillion-dollar investments to lie fallow, said Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting, in Berkeley, Calif. "With local and municipal governments, there seems to be a bad legacy of doing this."

Burns said he expects to present the business proposal with his recommendations to school officials in the next couple of months.