End-User Epicenter

So InformationWeek Analytics says ERP is Cool Again. We never thought it had lost its cachet to begin with.

According to the IW Analytics survey of 314 IT personnel, what these business technology leaders want is a little more support from their colleagues and organizations. Now that’s not a lot to ask. It’s not like they’re asking for more money. In fact, they’re not. Budget and training issues ranked lower on the survey, which bucks the trend of a few years ago when they were asking for budgetary increases.

Further, the article goes on to state that CEOs are looking for not only better reporting of metrics, but they want it to be accessible more often and in more places. They’re requesting that IT make these reporting tools accessible via mobile devices. Monitoring and enhancing those devices is a story for another day.

ERP applications act as a conduit of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the organization and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP applications integrate all facets of the business, including planning, manufacturing, sales, and marketing and therefore are critical in managing inventory, order tracking, customer service, finance and human resources. The benefits of this technology are many, and implementing the right system and making it work properly provides the added benefit of increased productivity, as well as the ability to drive positive results from an organization’s bottom line.

As more organizations re-engage with their dependency on ERP applications, we’d like to once again reiterate the need to monitor these business-critical applications, to ensure they’re performing as designed. Enterprises spend a lot of money and time to implement large applications like ERP and CRM, it’s only business-savvy to extend the life of these applications, as well as drive as much ROI from these projects as possible.  However, the value of a mission critical application is realized only when end users adopt the application to execute their tasks in an efficient and compliant manner. This requires organization to go beyond the IT centric measure of application performance and start leveraging end user perspective to measure the ROI of their IT investments. This is what Knoa’s end user experience and performance manager (EPM) solutions are designed to do that, as they bring a quantifiable measure of the end user experience and behavior. Specifically,  Knoa’s EPM solutions provide benefits to ERP such as:

• Ability to pinpoint and analyze user adoption issues that are hindering the achievement of business results
• Ability to pinpoint and proactively remediate problems that could impact the efficiency or the effectiveness of the people using the application to accomplish business goals
• Minimal business disruption from issues with the application
• Less employee productivity impact when there is an issue e.g. users spend less time on the phone with help desk due the improved mean time to resolution

We can’t blame CEOs and other line of business owners for wanting greater access to reports while inside and out of the office. Monitoring your critical ERP applications, now that they’re hip again, is a good best practice. But don’t just end at monitoring the IT components of your applications but go beyond that to truly understand the experience, performance and behavior of the end users when using these applications.