You invest in applications to achieve business top and bottom line business results - increase revenues, cut costs, bring products to market sooner, comply with regulations, and improve core end-to-end processes. For far too many companies something unexpected happens along the way to realizing that ROI. Months after the 'go-live' fundamental Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have not improved as planned.

Even the 'best of breed' ERP systems don't give the business stakeholders sufficient visibility into what's actually happening to ensure performance improvements. It's the end-users of the enterprise applications 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?

The most critical factor determining your long-term business results from an ERP application is the ability of your end-users to effectively execute your business processes. This means that each of your end-users must:

• Adopt and use the application
• Be able to effectively execute the key functions for their specific role
• Reach a level of proficiency where they can execute efficiently

Knoa solutions solution 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:

• Comprehensive application utilization metrics: which transactions are used, in what sequence and for how long?
• Actual user-experienced response time metrics: which transactions are slow and inefficient leading to unproductive employees?
• Comprehensive system, application and end-user error metrics: What critical errors do users encounter? Where are users having specific issues, and what training is required? Which individual users need specific assistance?

When all of the facts are known about the experience being received by the end users, and the performance being achieved by the end users, management can make informed decisions. And importantly, the effect of these decisions can be measured over time to improve your ability to identify and respond to performance optimization opportunities.

With actionable insight into actual end user experience and performance, the costs for end user support, application support and training are reduced. KNOA also impacts the top line by enabling organizations to optimize the effective use of the application by customer-facing roles.

Knoa's flexible reporting allows you to review:

• Which users are executing which transactions
• How many users utilized the application?
• Which transactions have they used?
• Which users are having specific issues and errors?
• Which transactions are being used the most?
• Which transactions are being avoided?

Peter Drucker, one of the most influential business thinkers of the past century, said, "You cannot manage what you cannot measure." The phrase has become a common business bromide, but at the time, it was the kind of insight that raised the bar for professional corporate performance management. It's time to raise that bar once again-by delving deeper and measuring the experience received and the performance achieved by the end-users of the enterprise applications that deliver the business results.

Business Performance Management is all about understanding the difference between what you've planned and what actually happens. If that understanding stops short of the end-user performance, this critical link in corporate performance is ignored, and no enterprise application will achieve its full potential. End-user experience and performance management solutions let your organization realize that potential by delivering an end-to-end analysis capability for an end-to-end corporate performance management strategy.