JJC Sets March 5 Go-Live Date for Long-Running ERP Overhaul

Joliet Junior College | September 16, 2026

Article Summary: Joliet Junior College administrators told trustees on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026, that the college’s enterprise resource planning modernization is on a 170-day countdown to a March 5 go-live date, with a formal “go/no-go” decision scheduled for February 2027. One trustee used the presentation to press for a full accounting of what the project has cost since it began in 2019.

ERP Modernization Key Points:

Go-live is set for March 5, preceded by a go/no-go decision in February 2027 and followed by six months to a year of post-go-live support.

Administrators rebranded the effort “the path to SaaS,” replacing the “optimization and modernization” label used since 2024.

The college’s customer relationship management system went live in two phases, the second on Sept. 10, and more than 5 million data values have been cleaned and migrated into a test environment.

Trustee Maureen Broderick asked administrators to produce the project’s total cost dating to its 2019 approval, saying the budget before the board did not show it.

JOLIET — Joliet Junior College’s enterprise resource planning overhaul — a project that has been restarted once, changed project management firms once and consumed several years of staff effort — will go live on March 5, administrators told the Board of Trustees on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026, during the longest presentation of a meeting that ran nearly three hours.

The update, listed on the agenda as item 1.6.1, was delivered by Dr. Yolanda Farmer, the project’s executive sponsor, joined at the podium by three college administrators and a representative of the outside firm providing project management and technical support.

President Dr. Clyne Namuo opened the item by addressing trustees who were not on the board when the project was reset.

“The history of this project is full of some trauma. Let’s be open and honest about it,” Namuo said. “But it’s also a story of resilience. It’s also a story of a tremendous effort of some really extraordinary professionals both internal to the college and external.”

Namuo said he informed the board a few months into his presidency that “the path we were on was not working, would not work,” and that the college initiated a restart in the fall and winter of 2022. “That restart was a triage moment,” he said.

A Four-Phase History, and a New Name

Farmer walked trustees through the timeline. The restart moved forward in 2023, she said. The college transitioned into what it called ERP optimization and modernization in 2024. In 2025, she said, the college made “a very bold decision” to move away from its project management company — identified in the materials as Campus Works — and engage a new firm.

“It was definitely the right decision for the college to move forward,” Farmer said.

Farmer then announced a new name for the current phase. “We’re calling it the path to SaaS because it represents JJC’s commitment to going live,” she said, describing the effort as “one goal, one team, one successful go live.”

Farmer said she has served as executive sponsor throughout and named the leadership structure in place since October 2025: a vice president serving as accountability lead for vendors and contracts, a technical lead heading the college’s IT team, and Dr. Erica Reyes working day to day alongside the outside firm’s project manager.

Reyes reported what she called the project’s wins. The college’s customer relationship management system went live in two phases — the first covering the application and core admissions functions, the second, covering recruiting, event management and communications, on Sept. 10. More than 5 million data values have been cleaned since the last migration and transferred into a test environment, she said. The college has also built a new reporting model informed by institutional research, with more than 40 leads across the college now working with department-level data, and has integrations under way with its student success platform, its dual-credit application system and its imaging system.

170 Days and a Go/No-Go

The project’s technical lead presented the timeline. Integrations and report writing are under way now, he said, with “several hundred reports” and “several dozen integrations” targeted for completion before go-live, followed by a testing phase.

“Something that’s new that I haven’t presented in the past because we didn’t have it in the past, but it’s new now is the go no-go decision,” he said. “We’re going to sit down, our partners, us, JJC, everybody working on the project and determine are we ready to go live in March. If we’re not, we’ll admit it and we’ll remedy it and work and fix it.”

He said post-go-live support could run “from six months to a year,” and pointed to a countdown clock on the slide. “So March 5, 170 days,” he said.

One trustee said the go/no-go milestone should be reported back promptly. “I just would appreciate and value as a board member being told on that day what the outcome is,” the trustee said, adding that the board should “really be celebrating some victories in our February board meeting.”

Budget Questions

A vice president identified in the recording as Kissell distributed a budget handout and walked through its line items, which she said reflected the budget the board approved on Oct. 15, 2025. The lines included a carry-forward from the prior phase, the ERP vendor’s implementation contract, a three-year contract covering both on-premises and software-as-a-service systems, CRM software, the new partner firm’s project management and technical support, a remaining reserve from the Campus Works transition, imaging software, backfill positions and a contingency line.

“We just didn’t know what we didn’t know,” she said of the contingency, explaining that the handout’s second column showed amounts either encumbered or paid and the third showed the remaining balance available.

Broderick said that was not enough. “I don’t see the true cost of what this whole program has cost, because when we approved it in 2019, it was at this amount and we have gone to this amount,” she said, referring to a figure in the handout she described as “the 6 million 190.” She asked administrators to assemble a history for the full board.

“I want to see what the total cost is,” Broderick said. “We’ve got others that we put in prior to the October 25th thing. So I would hope that you could gather some information for all of us to see, because I think it’s necessary for all of them, not just the ones that approved it in 2019.”

Trustee Alicia Morales, who said she worked at the college in the mid-1990s, described the system the college once ran on. “When we got stuck on something, we’d call a gentleman named Ray. He’d come down and say, ‘What do you need this system to do?'” she said. “Now I know he was putting like Band-Aids, but it would work at that time.”

No vote was taken on the ERP item, which was presented as a report.