Guest View: Are Your Apps Effective? See What Users Are Doing

By Thad Eidman

July 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
What do you say when the CEO is asking why your company didn’t reduce the “order-to-cash” cycle time as planned? Even if your company has a robust corporate performance management (CPM) system, chances are you won’t have a good answer.

CPM is the strategy, methods and processes that an organization deploys to direct its employees, partners, suppliers and customers to achieve a common set of goals. Companies measure performance through various mechanisms, including budgeting, score-carding, and querying results and variances through business intelligence. Each of these tactics transforms data collected by transactional systems (such as CRM and ERP) into insight about top-line performance objectives.

But CPM doesn’t give the business stakeholders any visibility into what’s actually happening. It’s the end users who execute the transactions that drive the processes that drive the business. Are employees actually using the right transactions to execute the business process? Are they using them in the right way? Are the employees efficient, or are they making significant errors? Are the transactions effective, or are they cumbersome, requiring employee-invented workarounds?

There’s a new generation of solutions that can give you those answers and not leave your CEO hanging: end user performance and management (EPM). EPM solutions give organizations a new focus on end user adoption, utilization and performance, uniquely capturing a complete picture of the end user experience and behavior, including user-experienced response time for key system transactions; comprehensive error metrics, including system and application errors, and user-created errors; and comprehensive application utilization (which transactions are used, in what sequence and for how long)

Order-to-Cash
To understand the impact of this insight, consider the following scenario concerning a billion-dollar heavy equipment manufacturer in Georgia.

One core priority for this manufacturer was to improve the order-to-cash process. This process comprises a number of unique business processes, from order entry to cash receipt. Because most companies are functionally managed, the order-to-cash process usually touches multiple enterprise applications and departments, including sales, order entry, order fulfillment and accounting. Therefore, it is important for each department to complete its part of the overall process error free and transfer correct information across functional boundaries.

Related Search Term(s): CRM, ERP management

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