Featured Whitepaper The Key to Better ERP Results?- it's the end-user, stupid. What do you say when the CEO is asking why your company didn't reduce the "order-to-cash" cycle time by 10 percent, as planned? Even if your company has an effective, integrated ERP system, chances are you won't have a good answer. Because, even the 'best of breed' ERP systems don't give the business stakeholders sufficient visibility into the actual execution necessary to ensure business performance improvements. This Executive Brief details a scenario where a billion-dollar heavy equipment manufacturer who used the end-user performance insight delivered by Knoa EPM to evaluate a shortfall in reaching a corporate performance objective - reducing the order to cash cycle. With Knoa EPM, the company discovered that the OTC process was compromised by ineffective and inefficient transaction execution. Download now>

Enterprise applications are a critical component in most companies' strategies. Whether you are using SAP, Siebel, Oracle, or proprietary applications, they enable the key business processes that consistently drive revenue and profits. For an enterprise application to deliver its intended ROI, users must embrace the features and functions of the application, using them to efficiently drive business transactions. Successful business process management depends on IT being able to measure and optimize end-user performance.

Aligning expectations for the application with how it is actually used creates a tremendous opportunity for IT departments to:

• Improve productivity
• Minimize costs
• Prove ROI

However, a lack of visibility into end-user adoption and effective use limits IT's ability to identify and prioritize the most impactful design elements, upgrades and issues. In the worst case, a lack of insight into realistic end-user behavior leads to operational shortfalls in which revenue generating business objectives are missed.

Gain an accurate picture of how users interact with your application before and after you deploy it. With Knoa end-user metrics, your development engineers and QA personnel can create more effective applications that will be used as intended.

Ensure your applications are designed based on how end-users really work, not how engineers think they should. When users have to adjust their work habits, modify their processes and learn unintuitive interfaces it slows their productivity, costing the company time and money. Knoa provides the development team with the insight to:

• Prioritize the features that will best enable your business processes.
• Determine whether interfaces are truly intuitive, minimizing training costs.
• Tie the use of the application to actual business processes, contributing to Business Service Management efforts.

Test real-world usage scenarios so you can detect errors and cumbersome design elements before the application is deployed. The development team can correct issues and functions that don't match business processes before end-users develop workarounds that make the application less effective.

• Predict conflicts and errors based on real-world testing scripts.
• Test the intuitiveness of the interface.
• Prioritize resources to build the most impactful features.
• Correct frequent issues and errors before launch.

Knoa end-user metrics show whether the application is being used as intended. By measuring adoption rates, feature use, performance to SLAs, error frequency, user compliance and more, you will ground your team's decisions and guide your priorities with data-based facts.

• Measure application adoption rates.
• Determine where rework or new functionality is needed.
• Determine whether adding a new feature would cause a significant change to how users work, slowing productivity.
• Speed troubleshooting for Level 3 engineers.
• Identify features that can be eliminated in future releases due to lack of use.
• Focus on features where users are having difficulty.
• Ensure users are executing appropriate transactions for their job functions.