Putting User-Friendly Information Retrieval on the Agenda

The Problem with Enterprise Resource Systems (ERP) and What to Do about It.

Today, every large company uses an enterprise resource system (ERP) to manage a variety of business data, such as product planning, product cost, manufacturing or service delivery, marketing, sales and more.

The intent of these systems is to help host and manage data from a variety of sources to help access and analyze business data in once place.

Although this appears to be a valuable solution, there are significant flaws in this model.

The Problem

The primary function of the ERP is to support the needs of daily business transactions. However, these systems have grown to become increasingly complex in pursuit of meeting the needs across so many industries. For many organizations, these systems have become a necessary but cumbersome part of transacting business. Furthermore these systems are generally not nearly as user friendly or intuitive as the users might wish.

For example, the reports available in ERPs are not designed to work for all companies, so they are stuck implementing custom-made reports and utilizing third-party external tools, such as Microsoft Excel.

In addition, running reports is too complex, time-consuming, and inconvenient for most business users. Therefore, only highly technical employees with proper training are able to run such reports.

Some organizations also use business intelligence (BI) software in order to better utilize the valuable data stored in the ERP systems, some of which actually provide a large cost-savings once these opportunities are discovered and corrected. However, these systems are designed for analysts or financial specialists, not to general business users or traditional ERP users.

This BI software typically has a security model that does not provide user access privileges at levels that meet the needs of most organizations. So, although BI software can provide very valuable data, its restrictions make it difficult to integrate into day to day operations.

The Solution: User-Friendly Information Retrieval

This is where the idea of user-friendly information retrieval comes in. This concept, which is designed as perfect marriage of internet technology with enterprise class security and reliability is a data access alternative for traditional reporting and traditional data warehouse and BI software. This is a newer yet important concept in the industry.

The key to this solution is that it focuses specially on easily and quickly accessing the data that matters to a non-technical user as opposed to a focus on the needs of the overly analytical user.

With this shift in focus, user-friendly information retrieval systems instead allow any user to quickly and easily access the data he or she needs to answer specific questions, empowering them to make wise and profitable decisions with very little training. They are designed to include appropriate security settings so that parameters can be put in place regarding what each user can access. In addition, these systems are scalable across a variety of different sized companies and industries.

Summary

So how do we move to a world in which user-friendly information retrieval is the standard? For one, employees need to be on board. This should not be hard because change is not difficult in this arena when solutions are provided that make the job easier for the employees. Employees are easily motivated by the removal of mundane tasks as well as more empowerment.

The big problem today is that this concept is lacking in the industry as a whole, both among software vendors and their customers. We’ve come to our current status using solutions such as Oracle RDBMS, and SQL Server databases for data storage and ERP reports or BI tools for data access, but we’ve just begun to really see a change in the market to a true user-friendly information retrieval model.

It’s time that we make a change and start focusing on our efforts on serving the true users of this data. There’s no doubt that the current solutions are not meeting the needs of the every-day user, and we must take appropriate action to make that change happen for companies of all sizes and industries.