ERP and productivity: A close alliance

Business success can be attributed to a number of factors, but the core of every business is its human resources. In order to be effective and productive, employees use software such as ERP to perform a wide range of tasks and processes and it has been proven that certain characteristics of ERP solutions are of vital importance to end users and have significant impact on their productivity.

In particular:

One of the most important factors is speed. Users are primarily interested in how quickly they can enter data or execute their daily tasks. If they can save time by using shortcut keys, they won’t use the mouse. If the mouse proves to be more efficient, they will not touch the keyboard. Furthermore, end users want to be able to find the information they need when they need it. They don’t necessarily care for elaborate graphs and charts, but they do want direct and easy access. This is even more prominent with experienced users and/or power users, who typically prefer to have all the information they need in one screen and minimize scrolling, browsing and searching.

Another factor that determines the functionality of an ERP solution is the elimination of redundant steps. For example, if you study the behavior of experienced end users, you’ll see that they have memorized how many times they need to press Enter in order to get to the next field they need, skipping those that are irrelevant to their task. ERP solutions offer the advantage of customizing screens, so that you can pre-fill fields with default values or even remove fields from a screen, enabling users to get directly to the next field they want.

Finally, an effective ERP solution should have minimum latency. Any value below 100 ms between screens is considered exceptional. Values ranging from 100 to 250 ms are acceptable, while anything above 250 ms is definitely slow.