Liquid Canuck: Letter to Santa

I heard this morning that people have already begun their Christmas shopping - no doubt inspired by the Christmas tree displays already popping up in the stores.

And so it is with this premature Christmas spirit that I'm composing a letter to Santa.

Dear Santa,

All I want for Christmas is a user friendly, well designed, simple to use, web hosted ERP system.

Thank you.

Dave

It won't happen, of course. Not that I've been bad this year - but even Santa has his limitations.

The problem with ERP systems is that they're designed to be everything to a very few (huge) companies, rather than trying to appeal to a much larger audience of small to mid-sized businesses. They're "sold" at the Board level but have to be used by everyone else. So little consideration is given to the thousands of end users - they're just something that the implementation team has to "deal with" as the system goes live. A necessary evil of big system projects.

You see, the marketing of these systems has changed, but the product hasn't. It's too difficult for the application architects at Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft to reduce "functionality" (aka features) because they've spent a lifetime building them in.

Simplifying your application is very hard work. Making complicated systems easy to use is almost impossible - especially when you've never done it before.

It's the reason that in ten years, much of the country will be using someone else's product.

Fast forward to Christmas Day, 2017... You open up your gift from Santa.

Inside, just underneath all the wrapping is a shiny new hyper-link to your new ERP application, complete with userid and password. After you login, you're greeted with:

A friendly video guide then walks you through your "role" in the new system. (S)he explains how the Purchasing process works, and how you as a Purchasing Agent, will do your job. After a video tour of the application, you're presented with an invitation to test out some of the functionality.

The text is inviting, not intimidating. The designers want to ease you into testing out the system for yourself. Because the application is so well written, intuitive, with "chunked" input screens so you never feel overwhelmed by data fields. It features icons that guide you though the application without having to ask for help.