Information Systems (IS), such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, are being developed and used in organizations to achieve their business goals and to enhance organizational effectiveness. The effect of user participation on successful systems development and implementation of ERP systems continues to be an area of interest to researchers. Common understanding has been that extensive user participation is not only important, but absolutely essential to system success. Even with this understanding of user participation as one of the critical factor in successful IS development and implementation, empirical studies have been unable to conclusively link user participation to systems success. This paper uses a private university as a case study to examine the role played by user participation in the implementation of an ERP system. In order to achieve its objective, this study adopted a mixed method where both qualitative and quantitative approaches were used in the collection of data. The results of the study reveal that user participation has a positive impact on the likelihood of ERP system success, user participation by choice is the best, user participation leads to better understanding of system requirements, the more participation the more the satisfied the users are, and participation builds support for the system during implementation. From our results we conclude that user participation in ERP system implementation is critical for successful implementation.