Editorial from the March 2007 issue of Managing Automation

The User Interface Revolution(Easy as Pie)

by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Friday, February 08, 2008 12:29:59 PM                                     

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.

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