In addition to boosting your company’s profits and efficiency, ERPs are built to make your employees’ lives easier. Businesses often focus on improving processes when implementing an ERP, but supporting your personnel is just as important. Your ERP needs to work for your employees and the way they complete their tasks. An ERP that is optimized for user experience results in increased employee satisfaction, reduced training time and expense, better and safer data management, increased collaboration, and improved productivity.
Do you know if your employees are enjoying the benefits of a usable, intuitive ERP interface? If you don’t, ask them. If you uncover usability problems, don’t panic! Many employees’ concerns can be alleviated by optimizing your ERP’s user experience through the following four steps.
Integrate
Integrating your ERP with your other business systems like your CRM, e-commerce platform, or shipping system is important not only because it streamlines data and workflows throughout your organization, but also because it takes a big burden off your employees. When your ERP is fully integrated within your business, it saves your workers hours of time that would otherwise be spent on manually transferring data between systems. Integrated systems reduce errors and allow employees to spend their time on more important and profitable tasks for the company.
Automate
Another way to save your employees time is by automating as many workflows as possible throughout your business. Although some processes will always need careful supervision, many routine tasks can be automated through an ERP, such as notifying customers about order progress, assigning tax zones, and generating regular reports. Just like integration, automation frees up time for employees to use on more complicated and important projects.
Navigate
Making your ERP easy to navigate is a “must.” If your employees don’t know which tools are available to them—or if they can’t find the tools in a reasonable amount of time—your ERP and your company are not functioning at their best. One of the most important features your ERP needs is a robust, intuitive search function. Users should be able to find the processes, documentation, data, and tools they need through a name or keyword search. In addition, shortcuts, consistency in colors and icons, and drag-and-drop functionality can improve the navigation experience for your users.
Customize
Your ERP should be customized to your specific business needs, which includes the needs of your employees. You can customize user access based on user roles, which increases security and avoids overwhelming employees with too many options within the system. One of the best ways to customize your ERP is through unique dashboards for different users or groups of users. Through dashboards, your users can find shortcuts to the tools they use most frequently, visualizations of the data they need for decision-making, and notifications from the system. Allowing your employees to customize their own dashboards is a great way to encourage ownership and buy-in to the system.
Acumatica Puts Users First
If you’re looking for an ERP that puts users first, look no further than Acumatica. Acumatica includes unlimited user licensing and near-unlimited customization options along with personalizable dashboards, consistent visual cues and navigation, and built-in business intelligence tools. By following a customer-driven innovation model, Acumatica continually responds to and integrates customer feedback into their new releases. In fact, their most recent release focuses on usability.
At ASI, we can help you choose, implement, and customize the right ERP system for your business. Schedule a free consultation with us to find out how we can help make your employees’ jobs easier.