As Aplicor CEO Chuck Schaeffer once explained to TMC (News - Alert) in an interview, the ERP software provider’s focus on business process automation is to automate tasks and activities that streamline work processes, shorten business process cycles, and increase user productivity. This allows customers to define and implement their own business process automation routines with Aplicor’s workflow designer. This tool allows a non-technical person to define a condition or triggering event, which upon occurrence, prescribes a number of system behaviors to execute.

Aplicor’s business intelligence objective is to help decision makers make better decisions. This is accomplished with a suite of tools, such as dashboards, data warehouses and online analytical processing, which deliver key performance indicators, metrics and analytical information to people who can use that information. The tools allow knowledge workers to flex, manipulate or interrogate the information for deeper insight or to model the data according to different decision alternatives. We learned long ago that companies don’t achieve competitive advantage by putting data into an information system, but instead they can achieve competitive advantage when they can get data out of the system and into the hands and heads of the staff which can act upon it.

Just remember, cover all the bases before buying an ERP software solution. You must recognize the challenges that come with implementing an ERP system into your organization. The key is to derive the most benefit and minimize the risks of project failure. The aim of ERP software is to deliver tangible business benefits, as mentioned by Schaeffer: cost reduction, productivity improvement and measurable bottomline results. But did you ever think about the software’s user interface (UI)? Let’s be honest: if you can’t work with the software’s UI, you won’t be able to reap the benefits.

The user interface is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs, and the goal is effective operation and control of the machine, and the feedback from the machine which aids the operator in making operational decisions.

According to Denis Pombriant in a column found in Enterprise Irregulars, “The Aplicor UI supports flexibility but in a different way than the Microsoft (News - Alert) ribbon.  Aplicor supports a standards-based UI that is easy to figure out but it also enables multiple applications to be live at the same time, which supports a more natural ability to enable the user to sequence work.”

In simple terms, multiple applications can be active at once, and via tiles or panels each application can be called up instantly. Pombriant goes on to say, “It reminds me of a tabbed interface but without the need to remember which tab to go to — all the active applications are open in front of the user, but not scattered around the screen in separate windows.  Of course, Aplicor still supports tabs but I think users will naturally gravitate to the new metaphor quickly.”

You have to remember to be practical and implement a checklist before implementing an ERP system and software solution, as these initiatives usually take some dedication. So why not make it easy on yourself and use a solution that offers a more customer-friendly UI to guide you in your initiative?