A Tale of Two Cities
I am in Europe for a three-week road trip, visiting with Knoa customers and meeting with potential new customers. These trips can be a bit like one of those “Highlights of Europe” tours – if it’s Tuesday, it must be Paris. This blog post isn’t really a tale of two cities, but it is a tale of two customers in two different cities – Copenhagen and London.
“Real” customer interaction is catnip for marketing execs – we simply can’t get enough of it. It’s the richest, purest validation possible for our products’ “value propositions”. It keeps you on your toes, however. “Value Propositions” created in a conference room through a collaborative process with your best and brightest aren’t always as sparkly in the reality of the prospect’s day-to-day grind and quarterly objectives.
I recently reacquainted myself with the malapropisms of baseball legend, Yogi Berra to write an article comparing application management to Major League Baseball for CIO Magazine. And I have repeated one of his classics to myself several times already during this trip: “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
In theory, two meetings I had this week should have told exactly the same story. Both companies have just started the deployment of a new ERP system. They have both gotten to this point after 2 years (and unfathomable $millions). They have standardized on new processes; they are replacing dozens of legacy systems; they have created a centralized global competency center to manage the deployment of the new business system to more than 15,000 globally distributed end-users. And I had the opportunity, with both companies, to meet with the key ‘owner’ of the ERP project’s success.
In practice, both companies saw an entirely different path to value from Knoa’s EPM (Experience and Performance Management) solution. ‘Company One’ ran rather true to the script for a company at this stage of the lifecycle. They got very excited about the opportunities to mitigate the risks of the application performance and quality (a.k.a the end-user experience). They instantly ‘got it’ with regard to the opportunity to cut end-user support costs (at both tier one and tier two). They understood that immediate access to real metrics about response times, errors and utilization would take all the noise out of the process and allow them to focus on real issues and top priorities. And they grokked (can’t believe I just wrote that! If you’re under 40, Google it…) that comprehensive end-user metrics would shorten the expensive ‘hypercare” period by 30 to 50 percent.
Having had my off-the-shelf value proposition validated with such vigor on Monday, I had to quickly adjust when it became apparent that my planned pitch was not going to get the job done on Tuesday with ‘Company Two’. To be fair to me, the project in Company Two was about six months’ less mature. A small, controlled roll-out to the first 200 end-users had gone rather well and they were not quite expecting the miasma of noise, recrimination and business disruption that accompanies most ERP go-lives. Company Two had complete confidence that the ERP system deployment would go well. It’s not that they didn’t expect some wobbles. But, eventually the response times would improve, the bugs would get worked out and the application would settle down. Company Two was worried about user performance. Would the end-users adopt the application? Would they take advantage of all the rich decision support tools the application provides? Would they exercise the transactions efficiently, effectively and compliantly? These are usually the concerns of a more mature, and settled, ERP implementation. But, boy are they valid! Knoa research tells us that, on average, 50% of the functionality of an ERP system is never used. And, in general, only 20% of end-users are following the correct (most efficient, compliant) workflow. Most ERP implementations don’t fail to deliver the expected business results because the application is “slow”, poorly designed or of poor quality. Most ERP implementations under-deliver because the end-users never reach the point of optimally utilizing the tool to execute business process.
So, with Company Two, I had a completely different conversation. I got to share some of my favorite stories:
• The Consumer Products company that monitored utilization of the Cost Variance Reporting and drove adoption from 15% to 85% in six months – with a resultant decrease of 15% in cost variances.
• The Telecommunications company that discovered that agents in one contact center were 25% more productive because of an ‘unofficial’ workflow. This innovation was rolled-out to all contact centers as best practice; and resulted in a headcount reduction of 75 FTEs (full-time equivalents).
• The Medical Equipment manufacturer who discovered that its consistent problem of ending the month/quarter with both an order backlog and in-stock inventory was the result of user behavior.
What is so exciting about End-User Management is the capability to capture information and metrics that help improve the experience those solutions deliver to the end-user while simultaneously identifying opportunities to improve how employees use those applications. Comprehensive end-user monitoring helps companies realize value with a two-pronged approach – reduce costs and improve business results. It’s a killer combo.
