ERP Usability

Is your ERP usage flat-lining or accelerating your system ROI?

Poor usability characteristics and unintuitive user interfaces of ERP systems decrease productivity and increase costs for businesses. This paper explores how ERP end user acceptance may be monitored, what metrics may be associated with ERP system usage, and how these metrics may be used as a basis for making informed decisions about enhancing, and thus accelerating, your ERP return on investment.

2011 Winshuttle, LLC. All rights reserved. 3/11

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Is your ERP usage flat-lining or accelerating your system ROI?

Since the early 1990s, companies have invested billions of dollars in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to automate their finance, supply-chain, human resource and operations organizations. In a study published by Forrester Research, eleven ERP systems were evaluated from cost / benefit and usability perspectives. The critical finding from this study was that poor usability characteristics and unintuitive user interfaces of ERP systems decrease productivity and increase business costs. An important trend in information technology is now emerging worldwidesoftware solutions designed to enhance existing ERP business processes. Today software companies are beginning to market and sell ERP business process improvement solutions that address usability challenges. Essentially, these solutions provide simpler user interfaces and the ability to manage large amounts of data and complex processes on top of existing ERP systems. The result is a more usable experience for the end user of the ERP system. Of course, there are challenges: What are the costs/benefits of enhancing my companys ERP system? Where do I begin and which business processes should my team enhance with these usability tools to address our evolving business requirements?

This paper explores how ERP user acceptance may be monitored, what metrics may be associated with ERP system usage, and how these metrics may be used as a basis for making informed decisions about enhancing, and thus accelerating, your ERP return on investment.

ERP Usage declining

In Key Issues for ERP Planning and Modernizing ERP, these articles (Hestermann, 2009) (Woods, 2008) state that the investment made by companies in ERP was $38 billion USD and growing. These companies are also increasingly dependent on ERP for the information required to make key business decisions. This dependency increases due to ongoing requirements to integrate more data sources and streamline more business processes while keeping up with ever-changing market requirements. But while the dependency and criticality of business information continues to escalate, system usage by business users has not increased at anywhere the same rate. In fact, usage of ERP is flat-lining.

Why ERP challenges business users

Simply speaking, traditional ERP from software vendors such as SAP and Oracle is designed to address a broad range of business process automation tasks from finance, to supply chain, operations and human resources. This broad applicability makes ERP systems inherently complex to meet the enormous range of business process automation requirements across multiple departments. For example, an SAP HR on-boarding process entails accessing 25 screens to add one employee. Obviously, this is extremely cumbersome, often taking more than 20 minutes per new employee. By employing ERP usability best practices and automation tools, an HR professional can redesign this transaction and reduce the screens being processed from 25 to 1, and can now perform the same transaction in less than 2 minutes with significantly less support. This example is one of tens of thousands that can be improved using ERP usability design principles and tools and therein is the challenge: Which business process improvements should you tackle? What are the key metrics for determining these business process candidates for improvement? Table 1 highlights the top 10 financial transactions of literally tens of thousands of financial transaction types based on Winshuttles client log files that may be optimized with the Winshuttle ERP usability platform.

ERP Usability

Table 1 ERP Financial Transactions - Top 10 by SAP Records Processed (WS UBVA DB)

Compounding the issue is the rapid emergence of Web 2.0 technologies that have changed users expectations on how they interact with computing devices. Users accustomed to mobile applications that encompass location-based services, cloud computing, e-readers, and powerful laptop, netbook and tablet computing options are frustrated with how traditional ERP user interfaces deliver business information. These missed expectations, along with difficult to learn, hard to memorize processes and the cryptic screen codification of ERP systems, drive down end-user acceptance and can add significant costs in terms of inaccurate data and time lost due to lack of user interface familiarity. And the financial impact just doesnt end there. Note the following table (2) and the costs related to poor ERP Usability. Table 2 ERP Usability Cost Drivers & Savings Drivers Description

Transactional Productivity Improved throughput and data quality Help Desk Reduced calls for support and special requests Training Development Deployment Ease of use for end-users and IT significantly reduces need for online and classroom training Initial and ongoing development savings for both local and global business process improvements domain expert driven development Improved timeliness in test, user acceptance, production and change management

ERP Usability

Other cost impacts resulting from the lack of user-friendly ERP systems include: Transaction productivity along with improved throughput and data quality, high-frequency transactions can significantly hamper productivity, as can highly complex, multi-screen business transactions which are difficult to memorize and process. Support costs massive investments in shared services such as call centers, help desks and IT support for ERP process automation help is required to provide ERP system support. Training costs the continued training and retraining of employees increases ERP costs and decelerates your ERP ROI. Employees cant get real work done because they are spending too much time learning and relearning ERP processing routines. Development and deployment costs and IT backlogs requests for process improvement (usability improvement) applications require significant IT resources and investment. Employees have to wait months to get much needed process improvements.

Figure 1 highlights the challenge with improving ERP business processes. Consider how a company or organization begins to get a handle on its ERP usability process improvement initiatives? Is there a better way forward to understanding where these process improvement opportunities exist?

Figure 1 the challenge with improving ERP business processes is identifying which processes are best for optimization

ERP Usability

Getting a handle on your ERP process improvements

Assessing your current ERP processes is a critical first step in addressing ERP system usage. A solution to this is a usability business value assessment (UBVA see figure 2) which is a process of analyzing your existing ERP system log files and correlating these logs to existing industry process improvement benchmarks. The result is a comprehensive ERP process improvement plan. By focusing first on an assessment of your ERP system usage, you will have the key insights into which existing business processes are the most complex for users to execute, along with data on high-volume transactions that are soaking up end user time and productivity. The key benefit of the UBVA is that it is based on industry assessment data serving as a benchmark to accurately and rapidly identify ERP processes yielding the highest benefit from improvement. The value assessment identifies the processes in terms of reducing overall frequency and / or transaction complexity stack ranked by time saved. Often the UBVA can produce anywhere from a 20 200% enhancement in process improvement as measured by user capacity to process data.

UBVA Feature Identification of key ERP users by transaction frequency and complexity Identification of high yielding transactions based on correlated savings as recognized by companies in the same industry executing the same ERP transactions A module by module view of every single transaction processed and the potential FTE days savings estimates A listing of custom transactions and other unique transactions that would make good candidates for process improvement

UBVA Benefits Maximize your most productive employees throughput while working to improve lower performing employees output Get the highest returning business processes based on your industry benchmarks driving the fastest realizable cost savings Focus on the areas of your business needing the most benefit from ERP usability accurately and efficiently Get more efficiencies from your custom business processes by understanding their contribution to your ERP system

Figure 2 Usability Business Value Assessment Benefits

Other considerations when evaluating the decision to execute an ERP usability business value assessment:
Look for a company that provides expertise and industry benchmark data on which you can rely. The company should have a proven process that continually updates industry benchmark data and statistically analyzes this data to ensure quality benchmark information is used as the basis for the value assessment. Check to make sure an industry benchmark database is comprehensive both in volume and the overall breadth of process improvement resources and data. It is not enough to monitor only ERP finance transactions or a limited number of industry uses. The benchmark database (see table 3) should represent a broad range of industry segments (e.g. consumer goods, aerospace and defense) and also representative of a broad range of finance, supply chain, operations and human resource ERP transactions. Ask whether the process and methodology results in providing a guide to usability process improvement. Seek out a methodology that is based on several man years of quantitative and qualitative research. Look for the specific interviews; ask about the basis of the data used for benchmarks. What types of log files are used, what data is used, and how the ERP log files are used as a basis for the usability value process.

ERP Usability

Partner with a firm that has years of experience, thousands of users, and millions of ERP usability improvement transactions to call upon. Make sure your contact understands your existing ERP usability challenges, but is also able clearly articulate the potential ERP usability process improvement capabilities.

Winshuttle UBVA Database Metrics

Total SAP records processed Total Winshuttle transactions Avg records processed per transaction Unique SAP business processes tracked 104,942,934 162,041 648 600

Table 3 Winshuttle UBVA database - Real world industry benchmarks for ERP transaction improvement & usability (3/11)

Obtain more insights

If you are interested in learning more about what an ERP usability business value assessment can do for your company, contact Winshuttle, LLC at 425-941-7175 or visit our website www.winshuttle.com to get more information.

ERP Usability

Winshuttle is the ERP Usability Company, providing software products that enable business users to work with SAP directly from Excel, Web forms and other interfaces without any programming. Winshuttle focuses on a simple fact when using SAP applications, time is money. Winshuttles usability solutions radically accelerate SAP user transactions, saving and redirecting millions of dollars for SAPs customers every day. These financial benefits are achieved by significantly reducing employee and contractor costs and increasing resources to address more strategic priorities. Thousands of customers use Winshuttle to make their SAP lives easier. Headquartered in Bothell, Washington, Winshuttle has offices in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and India. For more information, visit www.winshuttle.com.

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ERP Usability