Why do our customers love our software?

I have been as every year attending the Sage Summit event. This event is dedicated to Sage products, and customers as well as resellers are all present together to have news from Sage, training sessions on the products, exchanges sessions (Sage Village), insights of the future products and of course fun.

The last session I have attended was a very interesting one. It was the customer advisory group for our product, and this is an exchange session where some of our customers explain how Sage ERP X3 helps them to grow their activities, to streamline their operations.

The customers that were present are all holding very different activities : manufacturing, chemical industry, food, services...

But what is really remarkable is that the reasons our customers love our ERP are all different. I heard many reasons that have been given, related to many features, tools and components included in our ERP. The reasons I heard were the following:
- upstream and downstream traceability especially critical for food industry
- financial data extractor
- multi-legislation capabilities
- powerful workflow engine
- easiness of personalization
- after-sales and related maintenance functions
- integrated configurator engine
... and I've heard dozens of other reasons.

Sometimes, functions that seem to be minor for some users are critical for others, and this makes the difficulty of our job: build the best in class ERP, able to deliver all the functions our customer need, while keeping it simple to use and to set up. If you consider the different needs our users may have, and the various tools you have to provide for this, keeping the software easy to set up is probably one of the most difficult tasks we have. But we still continue to make progress on this.

User interface and user addiction

These pictures have been shot in Paris, France, near my house. A urban earthwork has been temporarily stopped for six months: big bags filled with soil are still waiting to be used for filling the holes protected by a barrier.

And nature did its job: seeds brought by the wind, rainy weather during spring and early summer…  In August, the result is a wonderful wild flower bed.

How does this bring us to software? Well, this illustrates the fact that nature is able to adapt even to not very good conditions, do the job, and produce a nice result.

And this is the topic I want to discuss today: computer usability. If you design software with an acceptable but not optimal user interface, users will adapt to it and get their job done as long as a minimal set of conditions are fulfilled: that training has been given, and that the system manages to execute, even in bad conditions, what is requested.

Let’s go a step further: if you get back to your users several months later, some of them will complain about the user interface, but most of them will be comfortable with it, just because they have become accustomed, and sometimes even addict to the twisted ways the job is sometimes done with your software.

This is probably why user interface design is an activity that needs to involve new users and should not be left to developers. Developers are aware of all sorts of nice tricks like right clicking to open menus with dozens of options, or playing with a wide range of buttons on a bar; they know the software, they use it efficiently and they find the user interface compelling. And skilled, long time accustomed users do not complain about it either.

I’m working for Sage, and at Sage, user experience is a value we cherish, because this is the main condition of effectiveness for customers who need to get their job done simply, quickly, and accurately.

In the Sage ERP X3 team, our flagship mid-market product team, usability is a key factor to success, and can still be enhanced. This is why, two years ago, we started an important project on the user interface. To design the new UI, we built a small team starting from a blank sheet, including designers and usability specialists, and last but not least… no accustomed Sage ERP X3 users.

The new UI is based on the following principles:

•          Intensive use of browser capabilities, with a very light shell: no more huge button bars or ribbons; instead, a lean presentation on pages that can scroll, grow and shrink; strong reliance on browser features that users are familiar with: hyper-links based on explicit texts, only a few well-known icons (home, tool), shortcut bar, search, back button and access to history; a lightweight and sober user interface where links are displayed contextually, for instance when hovering over the lines in a grid.
•           Compatibility with all recent browsers and devices (mobiles, tablets) with a good adaptation to these devices and their capabilities.
•      Ability to stop an activity because of an external interruption, and to resume it later at the same step even if the data entered hadn't been validated (we call this a pending draft).
•           Not blocking input if a mandatory field cannot be filled immediately (it will be filled later and maybe by another user working on the pending draft).
•           Personalization mode that allows the users to rearrange the screen layout and possibly share it with other users in a very intuitive way.
•           Search as a main tool to access to data and functions managed by the ERP.
•           Collaboration tools for teams of users to share documents and pages layouts.

The result of this work will be available next year in Sage ERP X3. The code name for this interface is Syracuse, and it was presented first at Sage Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, this summer. All to people attending this event were very excited about it. As soon as a recorded session will be available, it will post you the link.

I'm a French man, so I'm able to speak in French, and one of my favorite games is to play with words and to make funny jokes. Funny... At least I hope so. My daughters usually don't find them very funny.

So the question of today is : Where, in the suburb of Paris, France, should a company working as a hosting provider install their data center ? Or, if you want to change the question, who is the Saint that all the web 2.0 developers should pray every day ?

Saint Cloud, of course !

a very funny movie done in Europe

As you know, I work for Sage, and I would like to share with you a funny movie made by our collegues in a country from where an oversized ERP is originated.

This movie will summarize our philosophy for the mid-market companies : give to them a solution that is "right-sized" for them : not a small and limited one, but a solution able to start quickly, and to evolve smoothly with the needs of the companies when they grow.

Enjoy !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSFC9Dxm_kg

As matter of introduction

Hello everybody.

I'm french, but I will publish this blog in english, because I would like to give to these pages an international audience (you will probably consider that I'm a little bit presomptuous...).

I hope my english is understandable - probably not perfect, but english is not my mother language - and I also hope you will share and discuss with me points of views, opinions, thoughts... about one of my favorite subjects : the ERP, and more specifically ERP for mid-market.

I have a good experience of the subject. As french people said, "je suis tombé dans la marmite quand j'étais petit". I started my career in a small company - small is beautiful - but this company grew fast with very good products, was finally acquired by a bigger company, and I'm still here.

So I'm proud to say that I'm one of the fathers of the product we are still enhancing and make evolve, in order to bring the best solution possible to the mid-market companies.

I think I will give you more information in the next messages, but I would like to have your input about several questions :

- what is for you the mid-market ?

- what are for you the main concern of these companies ? Do you think these concern evolved with the economic downturn ?

- what would you expect from an ERP dedicated to mid-market ?

I have a clear idea of the answers I would give to these questions, but I would like to compare my vision to others.

Dominique