Kentucky Schools Launch Statewide Cloud-based ERP System

Tyler Technologies, Inc. has moved 173 Kentucky school districts from traditional on-premise deployments of its Munis®enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to a hosted Munis solution. The process took less than two years and makes Kentucky the largest school system in the U.S. on a cloud-based financial management system.

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has been a Munis client for 18 years. KDE recommended its school districts migrate to a hosted Munis solution for these reasons:

  • More reliable access and availability of Munis services compared to the individual districts’ on-premise infrastructure, which had reached end-of-life and needed significant investment.
  • Cost savings from transitioning infrastructure and software maintenance from the districts’ IT teams to Tyler’s technicians.
  • Disaster-recovery services with redundancy and fail-over features that would be cost-prohibitive for school districts to achieve on their own with an on-premise solution.
  • Tyler’s evergreen policy, which ensures the districts will continue to have the most current version of Munis without disruption of business or relicensing costs.

Of Kentucky’s 174 school districts, the remaining Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) is working with Tyler on a migration plan, and will keep its more than 100,000 students and 6,400 teachers on its current, on-premise Munis system until the migration is complete.

“By moving to Munis’ cloud-based model, we’re actually increasing reliability and capabilities for our school districts, while taking a lot of work off their IT staff,” said David Couch, associate commissioner for the Office of Knowledge, Information and Data Services. “Cost reductions are a benefit of cloud-computing, but for Kentucky schools, our primary driver was increasing the reliability of services beyond what our aging on-premise infrastructure could provide. For 18 years, Munis has been a very good product for us, and we’re excited about the cloud-based Munis model because it gives Kentucky schools an outstanding financial solution and infrastructure far into the future.”