How ERP is perceived has fundamentally changed over the past five years. Organisations are looking for solutions that bring together both business processes and increase employee productivity.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software has been under-used and under-valued by many organisations. According to a recent AMR poll about 10 percent of employees are licensed to use a business application and of that 10 percent only about half do so. This is because, in the past, capturing data and optimising business processes was the chief priority, with the end-user’s experience a secondary concern.

Employees had to go through inefficient, timeintensive steps to enter transactional data and run reports before they could get on with their jobs. This is now becoming unacceptable.

End-users have become a far more important when organisations evaluate their ERP strategy, and the ERP business case is now heavily reliant on staff acceptance.

When I’ve talked with IT leaders about how they use their Tier 1 solution and dug deep on this, I’ve found it’s dawned on them that they don’t actually run their business with their ERP system. It tends to control them.

This is because in many organisations, while the ERP solution captures business activity data, this is not where decisions, analysis and collaboration take place. This typically happens in the realm of email, the internet and Excel.

Microsoft is a relative newcomer in the business applications market, but it is committing a lot of resources to its Dynamics solutions.

The aim is to enhance Dynamics’ ability to integrate with Microsoft’s desktop and server applications—especially Office. This is because Microsoft believes there is a huge opportunity to make ERP and CRM applications more pervasive within organisations. The key is to make the applications easy to use, intuitive and of more value to the broader business population.

To do this the inflexibility and ease of use issues need to be overcome. For Microsoft this means blurring the lines between the business application and the world of Microsoft Office.

This is not just limited to Outlook, Word and Excel, however. Our ERP applications have to be intrinsically entwined with Microsoft SharePoint, for collaboration; Performance Point, for business intelligence; and Office Communications Server, for instant messaging, presence and voice over IP.

Our current software releases wrap all of these functions and capabilities into pre-configured, role-tailored ‘environments’. Through research, Microsoft has identified 37 key business roles and has pre-packaged functionality pertinent to those roles.

For example, if you are an accounts receivable clerk, the role-tailored approach delivers to your desktop only the information and functionality important to your job, such as daily outstanding receivables, overdue payments, bank reconciliation information and action lists. Such pre-packaging not only reduces implementation and integration costs, but also makes the products easier to use and adopt.

This strategy works well in New Zealand, where most staff don’t focus on just one thing during the day. In mid-market organisations, staff oftenundertake many jobs in addition to their job title role. An accounts receivable clerk may also take sales orders or book appointments for colleagues in Outlook. Having the ability to move between the business application and common Microsoft programs, without having to remember a new user interface, makes for greater productivity.

This also has wider benefits. Consider the traditional experience of using a business application: a lot of money is spent buying the software, more is spent training employees, and then more is spent maintaining the system and trying to evolve it so it can keep up with the business as it grows. But, despite all this investment, the typical result is a small user population, dissatisfied users and the value to the company of the software being quite limited.

What is often forgotten is that aim of business technology is to help people manage their business and to drive company growth. When ERP and CRM (customer relationship management) processes are integrated across an organisation – and the solutions are easy to use – business can thrive.

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