Shouldn’t ERP be Fun?
Playing Tiny Defense the other night, what a silly little game, but fun!
You start out with minimal capabilities, and then as you learn and progress, you gain tools to help in both your defense and offensive tactics and overall strategy. At the same time, the challenges you face increase in their capabilities and potential threat to your success.
As I was slowly learning the ropes, gaining confidence, making progress, and accumulating more experience and knowledge, the thought occurred to me:
Why shouldn’t ERP be this fun? Shouldn’t your ERP implementation be able to provide you with immediate feedback as to how your company is doing? If you have a really excellent implementation of an ERP, you might have a Business Intelligence (BI) tool that is showing you some high-level performance metrics like Sales Bookings, Backlog, Quotes % accepted, On-time delivery, various Quality metrics, etc. But what about the day-to-day operations folks? The ones actually making it happen for you on a daily basis? Shouldn’t they be having fun, too? Shouldn’t they be experiencing the instant gratification of a job well done? They shipped an order on-time (or early if the customer will accept it), they received quality parts in the right quantity at the right time from our supplier, they found a way to increase the number of units produced with the same quality in the company’s bottleneck, adding $2/min of throughput to our bottom-line.
Assuming you have a culture where that sort of performance is rewarded, maybe even expected, being able to play the game of improving your company’s performance for the benefit of your customers satisfaction and your stakeholders investment, should be – FUN!
Do you have the tools in place to make working at your company fun and rewarding?
By Synergy Resources
By Michele Shannahan