Leveraging Your People’s Skills by Choosing the Right Software

How many times have we all started a new job and had to learn how to use a system that was totally counterintuitive to the point of obnoxious? Here’s the transcript from that first day at work (I’m overdramatizing, but not by much):

New Hire: “So, there are sixty buttons on this screen. What do I do?”

Trainer: (rolls eyes) “You push the F2 button and then hold down the shift button while you click the Administrative Indices drop down and push the F3 button.”

NH: “I did that, and I don’t see the invoice I created.”

Trainer: “You didn’t create an invoice! You created 3 invoices! Didn’t you hit f6, enter, enter, enter to refresh the screen when you were finished?”

I don’t have to go on. My point is, ERP doesn’t have to be ITL (impossible to learn), and you should not have to go through unendurable pain when an employee leaves, and you should not have to spend a huge portion of your training budget to train employees how to accomplish everyday tasks like creating an invoice.

Your employees probably already know how to find and use information in a system that is categorized into logical sections on the left side of the screen (Outlook), and they know how to create a new document or spreadsheet by clicking on a piece of paper in the upper left-hand corner of the window (Word, Excel). Shouldn’t creating an invoice or logging a fixed asset be this simple? You hired your accounting manager because she knows accounting, not because she knows how to jump through hoops on an unintuitive computer system. You hired your buyers because they know how to manage buying, not because they don’t complain of brain damage during lengthy training courses.

The frustration and exasperation I witness from clients trying to store and make use of basic information is why I champion the Microsoft Dynamics platform. It just works! I feel like I’m empowering people by making them productive at work instead of just doing the best I can to shield them from an unusable system.

Here are some things I love about Microsoft Dynamics GP and AX that make our clients happy and make me look brilliant on the job:

• Out of the box integration with Office programs optimizes people skills
• A super-easy to learn user interface, if you have ever used Microsoft Office (and even if you haven’t)
• Once you learn how to enter one type of data, you’re already 80% of the way to learning the next task
• Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics AX are built on a proven and widely used technology stack, including the .net framework, so a consultant or programmer doesn’t have to dedicate his entire career to learning how to customize it and fit it to a client’s needs. You know what else that means? Your consultants don’t have to charge you a million dollars to help you make the most of your system and adapt it to your needs. Take that into account next time you are looking at a “cheap” ERP system.
• A flexible licensing model that adapts to just about any company’s needs without breaking the bank
•Tight integration with Microsoft’s business intelligence tools, so I can go to sleep at night knowing that the accountant behind the eight ball in month end close and the CEO who needs to know that one all-important key performance indicator RIGHT NOW are always going to get what they need without phoning at 11:00 PM

While you are deciding whether or not to change out the Brand X ERP system that you currently use that is not meeting your needs, don’t think of it as a waste of money retiring your old system. Think about it as no longer throwing good money after bad, but instead throwing good money after getting things done right, so you can get on with the business that you’re in.