FSN: Can the User Interface really boost the business productivity of an ERP system?

Can the User Interface really boost the business productivity of an ERP system?

3rd September 2007
In a leader article two weeks ago we highlighted the importance of the User Interface (UI) in the adoption of ERP software. A poorly designed UI can prove costly in terms of unused licence fee, increased training costs and wasted effort if it prevents user uptake of a new system. Yet the potential contribution of the UI to business productivity is rarely considered when organisations evaluate new software packages. So in this second article, Gary Simon , FSN's managing editor takes a second more in depth look at the humble UI and explores how different facets contribute to end user productivity.

One of the most astonishingly successful aspects of the Internet is that people from all manner of backgrounds and with a wide range of skills and IT competence can surf the net without a single day's training. Some would argue that most peoples' experience of the internet is hardly complex. Hopping from one web site to another or from one web page to another is not the most challenging of tasks. But of course matters have progressed significantly from the early days of web browsing and now many people around the world undertake sophisticated banking transactions on-line or book airline tickets, reserve their preferred seats and print their boarding passes without the merest hint of a user manual or on-line help. So how is it that the real world accounting and ERP applications cannot emulate the success of these virtual transactions?

Part of the answer lies in the inherent intuitiveness of the system aided by the kaleidoscopic choice of fonts, colours and symbols that can be harnessed to guide users through the intricacies of changing their choice of seat during an airline reservation. “If a picture paints a thousand words……” then the internet is surely a very good illustration of what can be achieved.

According to Keystone Strategy, a market research firm and Dr Marco Iansiti, the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School , familiarity and intuitiveness are closely related. Familiarity they say, measures the user's perception of how intuitive the application feels, how easy it is to learn, how quickly they can become proficient with the application, and how comfortable they feel using it.

Adoption is accelerated and training time is minimized by applications that feel familiar to users, that are similar to other applications they use, and that offer intuitive interfaces, features, and functions, says Keystone in a recent field study that compared SAP and Microsoft ERP systems for End-User Productivity.

The research study concludes that users learn “familiar” applications without extensive formal training and quickly attain a high level of proficiency in performing their jobs. They are rapidly productive at an individual level, which contributes to productivity at departmental and business levels. Low barriers to learning also contribute to higher adoption rates among users. Furthermore, “familiar” applications encourage users to explore the software and enable them to find and utilize “new” functions and capabilities, further enhancing business productivity.

“Usability” is another vital ingredient of productivity. It measures the user's perception of how easy the applications are to use, how “in command” of the application a user feels, how easy it is to navigate in the software, and how much the user enjoys using the software. High usability scores drive user adoption and reflect users' tendency to actually use an application, meaning significant investments are actually put to work, rather than sitting on the shelf.

An application's value to an organization and its impact on business performance can be maximized through greater application ease of use, says Keystone. This has practical implications for ERP installations. A high usability score can translate into greater usage, and it is reflective of a user's tendency to “explore” an application, to discover and utilize features and functionality with which the user is not yet proficient. Highly usable applications, therefore, inherently encourage users to extract more value from the application through more frequent and broader use.

Keystone put an interesting spin on “flexibility”. Whilst many users see flexibility in terms of the ability to tailor a system to an individual company's needs or perhaps a specific vertical market, the Keystone study offers the view that flexibility is also about the ability to d epart from “transactional” tasks to solve unusual problems or complete ad-hoc tasks. This they say translates into decision making agility, responsiveness to changing business needs, and addressing critical challenges quickly and flexibly.

Keystone's business productivity framework also includes measures around business insight, collaboration and transactional efficiency which when combined with measures of flexibility, familiarity and usability provide the basis of a comprehensive assessment of the contribution that software makes to end-user productivity.

It all goes to show that evaluating software suitability should extend far beyond a check list of prioritised features and functions. Arguably, lack of usability could impact Return on Investment just as powerfully as a missing piece of functionality. Yet for most organisations a solution's usability or flexibility is often far removed from the evaluation process itself.

However, the Keystone study makes a compelling case for change. The importance of user productivity should indeed be significantly elevated in software purchase decisions.

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