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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Usability and Business Applications

Some of you may (or may not) be famil­iar with the acronym ERP
or Enter­prise Resource Plan­ning. “ERP appli­ca­tions are a type of busi­ness
man­age­ment soft­ware designed to help com­pa­nies auto­mate day-to-day tasks, such
as tak­ing orders, keep­ing books, and man­ag­ing human resources.” Over the
last decade or so every self-respecting and com­pete­tive com­pany imple­mented
an ERP sys­tem. Pop­u­lar ven­dors include Ora­cle, SAP, J.D. Edwards, Peo­ple­soft
and Microsoft, to name just a few big players.

It has been known for a while that most ERP
sys­tems fall short on over­all usabil­ity. Last week I, together with some
fel­low stu­dents, was invited by SAP
to visit their head­quar­ters in the Nether­lands and test­drive their lat­est R/3
release. Let the fun begin, oh boy, where do I start. See, I’m pretty
con­fi­dent their sys­tem does work in terms of bare-bones func­tion­al­ity —
it’s just that it’s hid­den behind a plethora of usabil­ity issues
and poor user inter­face design. It’s such a shame that the tech­ni­cal inge­nu­ity
of these sys­tems is not max­i­mized (or even used at all) because of a mediocre
graph­i­cal user interface.

From what I was able to test it seemed notice­able SAP tried to improve some
usabil­ity fea­tures in com­par­i­son to pre­vi­ous releases, but the over­all achieve­ment
was pathetic at best. Poor infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, unclear nav­i­ga­tional wid­gets
and dubi­ous iconog­ra­phy, the whole sys­tem felt unnec­es­sary com­pli­cated and extremely
dif­fi­cult to use. More­over, place­ment of diverse ele­ments was unlog­i­cal in their
con­text of use.

For some years now it has been acknowl­edged (both in research and prac­tice)
that ERP sys­tems can add sig­nif­i­cant value to busi­ness processes (if imple­mented
cor­rectly). It still strikes me as odd that cru­cial fac­tors to suc­cess such
as usabil­ity and design have been neglected, or rel­e­gated to an infe­rior pri­or­ity.
Next time a com­pany fails to imple­ment an ERP sys­tem suc­ces­fully — mostly
due to employee reluc­tance — they might want to think twice about how
usabil­ity
and design influ­ence their rate of suc­cess.

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Tuesday, March 9th, 2004.

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