George Stelling has a dream. Stelling, the chief information officer at graphics semiconductor maker Nvidia Corp., wants to enable just about everyone at the
$3 billion company to become a confident and productive user of the company's increasingly strategic SAP ERP system.
Stelling's goal — which he has identified to his organization as a key objective for 2007 — is not surprising. Like many manufacturers, Nvidia has spent the past few years investing heavily in the ERP platform by expanding its footprint inside the company to encompass supply chain management, supplier relationship management, customer relationship management, business intelligence, and human resources management, as well as traditional finance and materials management functions. It's gotten to the point, Nvidia officials say, that 70% of tasks and decisions at the Santa Clara, CA, company rely on information and transactions managed by the SAP system.
The problem is that while the ERP system has become more pervasive and important, a large percentage of Nvidia's employees would rather eat worms than log onto SAP for even the simplest task. Why? "Accessing data is just not that easy," says Mouctar Diallo, Nvidia's senior director for IT architecture and development. "The look and feel isn't intuitive, and it takes too many clicks to find what you are looking for. Many people hate using it."
So Nvidia has come up with a plan. Working with SAP and outside consultants, the company is developing a series of tight integrations between specific SAP modules and desktop applications that are familiar and easy to use for most of Nvidia's employees, including Microsoft's Excel, Outlook, and Project. In this way, Stelling and Diallo hope, most Nvidia employees will become productive SAP users without even knowing they are tapping into the ERP system to get their work done. And Nvidia won't need to spend lavishly to train all of those new users.
"We are working to make the look, feel, and performance of SAP closer to the Microsoft tools that they are familiar with," Diallo says. "Today, we live and die with the information that is in SAP. We need to be sure everyone who can benefit from it has easy access to that information."
Nvidia isn't the only manufacturer that is struggling to extract more benefit from strategic software investments by broadening the number of employees who are productive users of those systems. Although many manufacturers have spent years — and, in some cases, millions of dollars — rolling out enterprise systems such as ERP, only 15%-20% of employees are currently licensed to use those systems at the average company, according to estimates from AMR Research. The most significant barrier to the use of ERP applications in manufacturing environments, according to a recent AMR survey, is that ERP user interfaces are too complex for manufacturing staff.
Vendors of enterprise and manufacturing software are beginning to respond to customers' calls for applications that can be more easily used by a wider audience of employees across the enterprise. After spending years focusing primarily on winning the race to add more features and functionality to their products, vendors such as SAP, Oracle, Epicor, IFS, GE Fanuc, Wonderware, and Rockwell are beginning to focus more of their resources on enhancing the user experience. Employing a wide range of emerging technologies — including service-oriented architectures and Web 2.0 tools such as AJAX — vendors are rolling out a host of innovations that, in addition to Microsoft Office integration, include interfaces tailored for people in specific functional roles, contextual search, and even visualization.
While these efforts won't do anything to resolve the increasing complexity underlying most enterprise and manufacturing systems, they should make them easier for individuals to navigate and use. And the payoff for users could be improved employee productivity, better visibility into more parts of the enterprise, and lower end-user training costs, experts say.
Following UI Fashion
Software vendors, to be sure, have historically attempted to keep up with ever-shifting trends in user-interface technology and fashion. In the 1990s, when Microsoft Windows and client-server technologies brought rich, graphical clients to the desktop, most enterprise and manufacturing software vendors traded in their traditional text-heavy green screen UIs. A decade later, with the rise of the Web, vendors dumped client-server in favor of simplified browser-based interfaces. And, more recently, the trend has been toward richer Web-based interfaces and portals.
Through all those changes, however, one reality has persisted: enterprise applications and much plant floor software have remained difficult to use, requiring loads of end-user training.
"They just aren't very flexible, and most employees would rather not use them if they had a choice," says Jim Cebula, global director of purchasing at Kennametal Inc., which has shifted indirect material procurement to an on-demand service from Ketera Technologies, Inc., in part to improve ease of use, drive broader usage, and, ultimately, gain greater control of procurement spending.
There are several reasons much enterprise software remains relatively user unfriendly. For one thing, experts say, despite all the graphical lipstick applied by vendors, most enterprise system screens still closely reflect the internal logic of the applications. And, since the logic that drives most enterprise applications is still heavily data-oriented — as opposed to process-oriented — most enterprise applications tend to present information in tabular form. So, for example, a manufacturing user interested in accessing the performance history of a piece of equipment would be presented with a table of machine events rather than a more familiar image such as a representation of a control room with dials and pictures of machines.
Also forcing UIs toward the drab and difficult-to-use is the fact that, even as the functionality of enterprise applications and the variety of users have expanded, most vendors have taken a one-size-fits-all approach to UI design.
"What you end up with is a lowest-common-denominator approach," says Jim Shepherd, senior vice president at AMR. "As a vendor, you end up making compromises with the UI to deal with all aspects of the job, and you don't provide a great user experience for any of them."
On top of that, experts say, vendors have been reluctant to spend lots of resources — and CPU cycles — on fancy user interfaces for fear that doing so would bog down overall system performance.
Finally, many vendors have been hesitant to tackle a head-to-toe UI makeover because of the sheer size of the task. "We have 7,000 screens already defined for our application," says Dan Matthews, chief technology officer at ERP vendor IFS. "We're not in a position to rewrite all of those, nor would all of our customers want us to."
Still, despite all of those hurdles, vendors of enterprise and plant systems are beginning to respond to customer demands for easier-to-use applications. The most obvious and widespread trend in enterprise software usability is the movement among many vendors to employ familiar desktop applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel, and Word as user-friendly front-ends. The idea is to provide to casual or occasional users of enterprise systems a familiar, accessible face with which they can comfortably access secure enterprise processes and data.
Not surprisingly, Microsoft itself has led the way in this regard, integrating the Outlook look and feel directly into the latest releases of its Dynamics family of applications, including Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM.
Other vendors are following suit, with the encouragement of Microsoft and customers. Last October, ERP vendor Epicor Software Corp. announced its Epicor Information Worker product, which allows customers to use Microsoft's Excel, Word, Outlook, and SharePoint Server to pull information from Epicor and execute specific tasks within the ERP system such as checking inventory levels or production schedules. Similarly, ERP vendor IFS in January announced its Intelligent Desktop initiative, which will enable primarily knowledge workers such as budget and production analysts to use Excel to access business objects such as work orders and invoices.
Even Microsoft nemesis Oracle Corp., at its recent Oracle OpenWorld event, demonstrated Microsoft Office integration with its ERP suite.
And ERP leader SAP last June began shipping its Duet Office integration products, which allow customers to use Office applications in conjunction with MySAP ERP-enabled business processes. As of the end of 2006, SAP officials say, 200,000 Duet licenses had been sold.
The 80% Solution
Office integration of the sort being touted by SAP, Epicor, and others involves much more than simply allowing for ERP database downloads to Excel. SAP, for example, in partnership with Microsoft, has created service-oriented mappings — using standards such as XML — between MySAP modules and applications such as Excel so that Office application users are able to tap into the context of specific business processes. SAP also has delivered what it calls an integration value pack for Outlook that allows the application to recognize and understand customer data definitions coming from MySAP and to participate in specific sales management business processes. Other business processes supported by Office integration value packs include budget monitoring, time management, leave management, organization management, recruitment, travel, analytics, and purchasing.
Office applications as familiar front ends to ERP-enabled processes are not intended to replace the screens used by most trained ERP users today, vendors say. Instead, they are meant to offer a way in to employees who today are not confident ERP users.
"This is focused on the other 80% of employees who need to consume information and make decisions, not primarily on users of SAP today," says Dennis Moore, SAP's general manager of emerging solutions. "These are the people who today use browsers, search engines, and Microsoft Office to collaborate, look for information, and respond to alerts."
That's exactly the role that officials at chip maker Nvidia envision for UI tools like Duet. The company has identified several opportunities where Office applications can be employed to give non-ERP users an easy way into SAP-managed business processes. One is employee time reporting — linking Microsoft Outlook and Excel to SAP's Employee Self Service, Management Support System, and Cross-Application Time Sheet modules. Most of the business processes targeted so far by Nvidia for Office integration aren't yet supported directly by SAP's Duet initiative. So Nvidia, with the help of SAP and consultants, is defining the integration points itself.
Nvidia is also working on what it calls a cross-resource management planning tool that will let the company more easily track and report on the status and resource consumption of key projects. Nvidia has long wanted a central place to record and analyze such information, Diallo says, but engineers' distaste for the SAP user interface has stood in the way.
"Engineers in particular hate the look, feel, and performance," Diallo says. "The good news is that by substituting the Microsoft look and feel we will have 80% of engineering using SAP by the end of March."
On a Role
Vendors are also working on improving the user experience by breaking down the one-size-fits-all approach that has traditionally defined enterprise software design. Software providers like Microsoft and Epicor, for example, are beginning to introduce interfaces that are tailored for individuals performing specific functional roles within the manufacturing enterprise. SAP also has begun adding role-based interfaces, Moore says.
Microsoft, again, is ahead of many competitors in moving to role-based user interfaces, according to experts such as Ray Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research. Microsoft has spent the past two years gathering information from Dynamics customers about the responsibilities, information needs, and business processes used by individuals in specific functional roles.
So far, says Jakob Nielsen, principal user experience manager for Dynamics, the company has identified and described over 60 such roles. Microsoft is now in the process of delivering interfaces for many of those roles across its Dynamics product line, including the latest releases of Dynamics GP and Dynamics AX. The role-based interfaces are built around home pages that are designed to present information, alerts, and tasks that pertain specifically to an individual and his or her role.
At its recent Convergence user meeting in Munich, for example, Microsoft demonstrated a role-based UI designed specifically for a production manager in a manufacturing enterprise. Rather than being presented with a generic screen, the production manager sees a series of graphical elements that provides quick summaries of key performance indicators (KPIs), tasks, and messages related to his or her job. KPIs for the production manager, for example, might include the status of high-cost production orders and delayed supplies. The user can drill into each of those items for more detail. Another example is a UI for accounting which shows KPIs such as projected cash vs. payments and tasks such as purchase orders and invoices to be processed.
Not only will such role-based designs make users more productive, they will ultimately lead to higher levels of automation, experts predict. Once the logic used by specific individuals is incorporated into systems, predicts Jeff Wacker, corporate futurist at EDS, systems will be able to complete some tasks on their own.
"If you've got the context, the content, and process all in the system, the system can begin to alert procurement, for example, when a given part needs to be purchased," Wacker says.
Shared Context
But it's not just vendors of enterprise software that are beginning to rethink the user experience. Providers of MES and other manufacturing applications, including Rockwell Automation, Wonderware, and GE Fanuc, are also reworking UIs and their underlying data models with the goal of making plant data available and useful to a wider range of users.
"We're seeing a growing interest from our customers in getting plant information out beyond the traditional HMI/SCADA community that typically has used a stand-alone operator interface," says Bruce Fuller, business manager for visualization at Rockwell Automation. "We need to make data available to more enterprise users, but one of our challenges is: How do we make information easily accessible knowing that it's a different type of user who may not know much about the production line itself? They just know what data they want."
Traditionally, HMI/SCADA and other manufacturing software interfaces have targeted the plant floor operator who tends to need lots of specific, real-time information related to the operation of a few machines. The interfaces have tended to be simple, spreadsheet-based, and difficult for non-operators to use. More importantly, says Alison Smith, senior research analyst at AMR Research, most manufacturing application interfaces have made it difficult for users to switch or broaden context to, for example, take a broader look at plant- or enterprise-wide operations or look at trends over time; just the kind of information enterprise users increasingly want.
Vendors like GE Fanuc are attacking that problem first by devising new approaches to pulling plant- and enterprise-generated information together into a single place that can be shared by multiple applications and clients. According to John Dyck, director of the processing production management software business at GE Fanuc, the company is currently developing what it calls a Shared Equipment Model extension to the data model used by its Proficy plant information system products. The Shared Equipment Model, based on ISA-95 standards, will define how different pieces of plant equipment, processes, and people relate to and interact with one another, creating context so that users of different applications such as MES, manufacturing intelligence, and quality and asset management can more easily access high-level, enterprise-wide manufacturing information, Dyck says.
On top of that, GE Fanuc is building a set of graphical, easy-to-use interfaces with an Office-like look and feel that presents information tailored for different roles via KPIs, alerts, and search.
"The different user interfaces will be able to read data from the Shared Equipment Model and, using tools like search, find plant information," notes Dyck, who says the Shared Equipment Model and new interfaces will be added to Proficy this year. "It will save a lot of time because you no longer have to create context in each client. It's shared in a single place."
While several manufacturing software vendors are moving in the same direction, GE Fanuc is furthest along in redefining how users will interact with manufacturing systems, says AMR's Smith. "It's a radical departure, really," she says. "Historically, you haven't been able to access plant data using this kind of rich data model or through a role-based lens. The paradigm they've come up with is very interesting."
The Next Click
Vendors looking to revamp the user experience won't be stopping with Office integration, role-based interfaces, and new data models. In the not-too-distant future, many will also make use of a wave of Web-inspired technologies to retool UIs.
One such tool — search — is already familiar to Web users. Enterprise software vendors including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and IFS are planning to leverage that familiarity by incorporating search into their applications as a quick and simple way for casual users to access information. Oracle has said it plans to integrate search into the next version — release 12 — of its E-Business Suite. IFS plans to add a search feature next month, and SAP will announce search plans by the end of this month, Moore says. SAP will sell its search technology as a stand-alone product or embedded into platforms such as Duet or SAP's portal software.
The approach these vendors are taking to search, however, goes way beyond Google. Whereas users of typical Web search engines might receive thousands of returned items after making a query — many of them irrelevant to that user — search engines embedded in enterprise applications, vendors say, will be able to infer the context of the query and the intent of the user. By tying into the application's meta data and even information about the user's role, vendors say, such contextual search engines will understand exactly what a user means when, for example, he asks for information on an invoice number, employee name, or customer. Such quick and accurate search functionality will help even untrained individuals become productive users of enterprise software, vendors predict.
Vendors also will soon be using so-called Web 2.0 technologies and techniques such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to improve what in many cases have been bulky browser-based interfaces. AJAX, a programming technique, allows for Web-based UIs that appear richer and more responsive. (For more on AJAX, see sidebar.) SAP has said it plans in mid-2007 to make available a new browser-based interface — code-named Muse — that incorporates AJAX.
Many providers of on-demand applications, including NetSuite and Ketera, have already used AJAX to make their browser-based interfaces more responsive. In September, Ketera, a provider of on-demand procurement systems, replaced a traditional UI built around a requisition metaphor with a new user experience that includes search and is modeled on the Amazon consumer e-commerce site. The idea, says Pravin Kumar, Ketera's VP of products, is to help customers draw more users into the system, thereby increasing the amount of indirect material spending that is being managed.
Kennametal's Cebula says the new Ketera interface will help him expand utilization of the system, particularly in cases where Kennametal has acquired a company.
"With our spend level in the billions of dollars, the sooner we can get people using the systems, the lower our costs will be," Cebula says.