ERP can hamper business agility, says IFS study

The study, which examines the usability of ERP systems in seven industries across the UK, US, Germany, France, Benelux, Scandinavia and India, suggests that ERP developers must improve their software to handle increasing business complexity. It also reveals that nearly two thirds (60%) of users consider some tasks a waste of time when using the enterprise applications, while almost half (45%) expect noteworthy business changes to take place within the coming 12—24 months. Fully 82% of these believe their ERP systems will need modification to support the coming changes, and 44% believe their current enterprise applications have a negative impact on business agility. "The study proves what we at IFS have known for many years: usability and agility are vital for companies in terms of productivity. IFS will therefore continue to focus on usability and user experience," states IFS CTO Dan Matthews. "The research clearly proves that, while being essential for running a company, enterprise applications are likely to hamper productivity through unintuitive user interfaces, poor integrations, difficult navigation and insufficient search functionality," comments Anders Elbak, research manager at IDC. For him, the revelation that 71% of CEOs don't rate the usability of their ERP systems is all the more surprising, given that 60% say they had considered that attribute when purchasing their system and that 24% had held it as the most important consideration.