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ERP systems are resource intensive systems handing critical functionality in corporations such as HR and Finance. Others handle student enrollment and scheduling for universities, manage and track employee training and more.
Of course, all of them are the best – Just ask them. I’m partial to PeopleSoft because as a developer, I’ve hooked my horse to that cart almost 30 years ago. Yes, I’m biased.
You don’t install these systems over lunch, upgrade them before the next meeting or import them into a competing product with a few clicks on your phone.
They are incredibly complex and expensive to support.
They are incredibly complex and expensive to use.
All these software companies are constantly working, innovating, and investing to improve the user experience. They all show how easy and available their systems are to those end users to deliver decisive business intelligence to everyone from the front-line employees to the C-Suite. They’ll integrate with anything and everything.
But many of these end users don’t love their systems. They use and suffer with them because they don’t have any other choice.
These users are not IT, Finance or HR people. They are people doing the work. They manage people doing the work. Most of the time they do both, but what they don’t do on a regular basis is IT, Finance or HR.
I think a big part of the problem is that many of the ideas and business processes requiring these systems are not simple enough to present to average users in one, clear screen. Or even how to navigate to that one screen from the hundreds available… this time.
What if the next ERP UI is AI?
In PeopleSoft, we used to navigate to a specific page with the functionality needed and then search for the person or thing to work on: Navigate to the Job page, then search for your employee.
With modern search, that changed to “Search, then Navigate”: Search for the person, invoice, or thing you need and then see list of common things to do: Find your employee, and then Job is one of the available actions.
What if we just let the users talk to the system in their own words? Use a prompt, microphone or whatever to communicate with the system using natural language:
- When was the last time Bob got a raise?
- How long has it been since Mary had a vacation?
- How often does this customer order?
- Have we had many problems with this vendor in the past?
- Transfer Bob to Mary’s department and give him a 5% raise.
- Give Mary a raise too.
This is more than just chatbots with key words and behaviors.
Let it have the whole thing. Let it learn what and how from the system.
We have built these incredibly complex systems around our business rules and filled them with mountains of deep data. Most companies have built customizations to support their unique needs and requirements that don’t easily port over to the next vanilla ERP system.
What if we trained an inhouse AI system on our EPP system data instead of upgrading to the next ERP flavor of the day? It would always be updating the new data and processes, and it would always be behind our firewall, secure to our organization.
With some exceptions, we can probably do this with the systems we have rather than first spending millions of dollars and years of effort to re-platform to a new system and then feed it to a AI.
I don’t think that the AI UI is the end all User Interface for all users. It’s far from a panacea. We still need expert entry and to be able to touch the fine details. We will always need to see and understand the actual data. Regulations, business rules, integrations and process are constantly in a state of change.
I want HAL to quickly tell our users what they need to know and help them correctly do what they need.
But when I ask it the AI to show me how it generated a decision or recommendation, I want to see data and business processes. I don’t ever want to hear “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”.
I’m not Dave.
