Professor Peter Best’s leadership in optimising the link between academic study and cutting edge industry insights has secured the Griffith University Discipline Head of Accounting, a prestigious SAP Outstanding Academic Award.

Acknowledged for his long term support of the software giant’s University Alliance Program (UAP), which reaches out to more than a million students worldwide, Professor Best was pleased to be one of four academics awarded worldwide.

“I’ve been teaching, researching and performing industry projects with SAP since 1999, and so was absolutely delighted to hear that I was one of this year’s recipients,” confirmed Professor Best.

“The significance of the award is underpinned by SAP being a global market-leading, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, used by approximately 30% of medium to large private and public organisations throughout the world.”

“Such is the outstanding global reputation of SAP software, it has already been shown to be a great enticement for International students looking to undertake post graduate business studies in Australia.”

“This puts Griffith University in a prime position to facilitate such valuable admissions through the use of best practice technologies in order to maximise students’ employability upon graduation.”

SAP is used by all of the Queensland government plus many federal agencies and is widely used within the private sector through major organisations such as BHP, Australia Post, Telstra and Shell.

Such enterprise systems provide a rich source of research opportunities which has also provided Professor Best a platform from which to pioneer expertise within the field.

“Industry projects have also been completed in the review of SAP security, continuous control monitoring and automated fraud detection methods, so at a personal level it’s great to be involved in the continued evolution of this outstanding software,” added Professor Best.

“And this also provides a distinctive advantage to Commerce students, with Griffith the only Brisbane University to offer such students’ access to the most up-to-date version of the software under SAP’s University Alliance Program.

“With significant investment in research in accounting standards and business best practice, the SAP software integrates well current regulations and optimal business processes with principles taught within accounting and auditing courses.