In today’s fast-paced world of dynamic digital applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software rarely makes the digital A-list. While ERP software handles many core financial and other business processes for virtually every large and midsize enterprise, nobody expects their ERP to be especially flexible or cutting-edge.
ERP applications have always captured transactional data and automated business processes. However, many ERP systems are inflexible and limit the organization’s ability to get work done. And yet, whenever the dinosaurs in a software category fail to adapt to change, opportunities abound for smaller, nimbler players to emerge, and eventually displace the dinosaurs of old.
Netherlands-based Unit4 is one of those nimbler players in the ERP space. Their unique angle: people-centric ERP. Instead of requiring people to sit down in front of their computers and undergo tedious, error-prone data entry tasks, Unit4 pares down the necessary interactions and brings them to the user on whatever device is relevant to the task – in other words, a truly digital approach, or what Unit4 calls self-driving ERP.
Unit4 empowers its customers to manage their entire services operation in a single, integrated, cloud-based ERP suite. As opposed to traditional ERP solutions, which are difficult to use and require complex customization whenever a customer has a special need, Unit4 designed its platform to help users adapt the system themselves to reflect ongoing business or operational changes.
Over the years, Unit4 has built software for people-centric industries like professional services, higher education, and government, and these verticals are still its sweet spot. After all, the digital story is at its core a customer-centric story. Unit4’s people centricity is particularly well suited for businesses in a constant state of flux, as its focus is to help customers embrace change as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
Self-Driving ERP: When Less is More
You might think that as people increase the use of a particular software application, the more useful it becomes – but Unit4’s self-driving ERP has the opposite philosophy. In fact, Unit4 minimizes user interaction and limits activities to those where people make a difference. In other words, the less you use it, the more valuable it is.
Self-driving ERP depends upon the automation of manual tasks, reducing or eliminating the amount of input necessary, predicting problems as well as opportunities before they occur in order to make intelligent recommendations as to a course of action, and using the moment of action to ask for input. In this way, Unit4 meets the expectations around self-driving applications as shown in the graphic below.
Expectations around Self-Driving Applications (Source: Unit4)
By meeting the expectations above, Unit4 can help its customers increase competitiveness, for example, by improving the decision making process around whether to bid for projects, or by increasing the speed and accuracy of creating associated project proposals.
Self-driving ERP can analyze projects similar to the one that a sales person is proposing and automatically make recommendations for the proposal, the project plan, as well as the assignment of all relevant people to the project.
Self-driving ERP can also reduce risk by proactively flagging potential issues in a project based upon sentiment analysis of other team members’ responses, and can use pattern analysis to flag potentially fraudulent invoices, thus easing the approval process and improving its efficacy.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of self-driving ERP, however, is the elimination of manual data entry. For example, Unit4 can prepopulate expense reports with common items based upon pattern recognition of previous expense reports. All users must do is confirm or adjust the suggested entries.
A good example of Unit4’s self-driving functionality is the Unit4 Me application. Unit4 Me provides a single point of access for each user to support their ‘mobile moments.’ The term mobile moments refers to those occasions where someone accesses their smartphone for a specific task at the time and place of need.
Unit4 Me sends users all relevant data about their job, assignments, and business updates when and how they want them, with the context and timeliness of tweets. Users are then able to perform a variety of relevant, self-service tasks.
For example, Unit4 Me provides core timesheet functionality, including viewing vacation and overtime balances and entering absence requests, as well as basic human resources functions, like viewing pay slips and updating personal information.
The same application also enables users to view project assignments and alert team members about their personal availability. Furthermore, users can get all relevant business alerts on their smartphones or even their Apple Watch. The Unit4 Me application appears in the illustration below.
Unit4 Me Application (Source: Unit4)
With Unit4 Me, professionals have access to a pared down, simple interface that works on their phones, tablets, or any other device. In fact, the mobile version isn’t truly a separate app, but rather a seamlessly integrated interface into the core product that Unit4 has optimized for mobile.
Now professionals can both receive and enter information as events occur – and furthermore, managers can approve their entries with equal ease.
The Intellyx Take
User’s mobile moments like the ones that Unit4 Me supports are in fact part of a larger trend that characterizes digital applications broadly: people don’t want to change their lives to work around software. Software must rise to the challenge of meeting people’s needs when and where is most appropriate.
It’s one thing for a modern digital app like, say, Twitter or Instagram to support the mobile moments philosophy for software interaction – and quite another for traditional enterprise applications like ERP. Unit4, however, has successfully bridged this gap.
The benefits to customers of this self-driving, people-centric approach to ERP are profound. Where before, all the interactions with the ERP application, from data entry to approvals to customization, were enormous time and money sinks for the enterprises that used them, today Unit4 is paring away all that excess expense and wasted time, focusing instead on bringing value to customers when and where they need it.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. Unit4 is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this article.
