‘A Fantastic Opportunity’: Poole Student’s Presentation Dazzles Business Leaders

Parker Steele knew he’d have real-world opportunities as a Poole College student. But he may not have guessed that a single event would deliver such a high-impact experience for him.

That’s what happened recently when the dual-degree accounting and information technology student demonstrated a bot developed for the purchase-to-pay process he learned about in a class taught by Poole accounting professor Marianne Bradford.

Steele made his presentation — live — to a group of about 130 business executives at NC State and then answered technical questions.

The overall audience takeaway? Wow.

“He did such an amazing job with everything that he ended up getting several people wanting to hire him right on the spot. I was told over and over how great he did and how impressed they were with our program,” Bradford says.

Steele spent valuable time networking with the business leaders the night before the event and the next day at lunch.

He presented at a meeting of the Carolinas chapter of the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group, a network related to Systems Applications and Products (SAP) enterprise resources planning (ERP) software. Companies use the SAP centralized system to enable all departments to access and share the same information.

At the meeting, Steele demonstrated the bot he and his classmates tested last fall in Bradford’s course, ERP Systems, Implementation, Risk and Analytics. The class was the first to use robotic process automation (RPA) with business automation platform UiPath’s software to create a purchase order in SAP.

Explaining the bot to a packed room of executives “was nerve-racking, to say the least, but was a fantastic opportunity,” Steele says. “I am thankful to the Poole College of Management and its faculty for giving students exposure to opportunities like this.”