Why you need a user-friendly ERP platform

Learn why it’s important to give thought to how usable and customisable your business systems are—and what sets MYOB Advanced apart when it comes to usability. 

It’s short-sighted to roll out software that doesn’t simplify and improve the user experience. Users are people who work in your business and interact with your systems, which include partners, suppliers, and customers.

You don’t want to confuse, frustrate and deter your employees, partners, and customers—do you? 

So if you implement systems that are supposed to make their work better, and their lives easier (through self-service portals or online ordering, etc.), you need to make sure those systems are easy-to-use, efficient and effective.  

MYOB Advanced stands apart when it comes to system design, user experience and automated mechanisms that help people to find what they need fast, complete tasks with less effort, and minimise errors.

What is usability and how does it improve productivity?

The Interaction Design Foundation says a system’s usability depends on how well its features align with what the user wants to do and the user’s environment. 

The foundation argues that a usable system should enable users to:

1. Become familiar with, and competent in using it, quickly.
2. Achieve their objectives through the easiest method/process.
3. Remember how things work and streamline their actions on subsequent visits.

A system that’s designed for superior usability helps users achieve their goals in the most elegant and timely way, thereby increasing the speed, precision, and quality of tasks they want to complete. 

For small to medium businesses transforming their company-wide systems, that’s a highly desirable outcome. 

User experience paves the way for successful digital transformation 

When implementing a new ERP solution, managing change can be difficult. 

The success or failure of your implementation (and therefore the return on your investment) hinges on whether employees actively input information and leverage the new software to improve business outcomes. 

If people avoid it like the plague—they have a disaster on their hands. If intensive, ongoing training is required for people to understand or modify the system, your cost of ownership blows out. 

Ease of use helps employees adapt to new systems, as well as any new processes you’ve embraced in the course of your digital transformation. It smooths the transition from legacy systems and old patterns of thinking. 

Your team is far more likely to feel enthused about such a major change if your new enterprise solution is less complicated, more engaging, easy to learn, and genuinely useful. 

Another benefit of a more usable system is reduced manual effort, workarounds, and delays—which will boost productivity and allow users to spend more time on operational tasks, planning, innovating or serving customers.

So, even though you might be focused on reducing up-front costs, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot if you select software that skimps on usability. For a new enterprise system to deliver a positive ROI and lower costs over the lifetime of the software, usability matters.

Reasons to choose MYOB Advanced for a more user-friendly ERP solution

MYOB Advanced is a flexible, cloud-based ERP system built on modern technologies and developed to be fit-for-purpose and engaging for users. 

It’s right-sized for small to medium businesses seeking a solution that goes beyond basic accounting software but isn’t out of reach budget-wise. 

The helpfulness of user interfaces is not an afterthought in MYOB Advanced. As soon as a user logs in (from any device, anywhere because it’s in the cloud), it’s easy for them to find and act on relevant, real-time information. 

MYOB Advanced also allows for highly configurable screens, so users can create dashboards, alerts, reports and navigation that’s pertinent to them. That is—the system is easily tailored for an individual, in order to make the system even more easy to use. 

Here are 5 ways MYOB Advanced makes life easier for your team:

1. Online access: Employees can log in from any web browser, from any device, at any time. Users can choose between single or two-factor login for security. The convenience is incredible. For instance, a salesperson heading into a meeting with a customer can use their smartphone to quickly get up-to-the-minute details about previous orders and notes from the last meeting.
2. Tailored workspace: Users can customise the screen they see after logging in so that it is easy to navigate to the critical information they’ll need daily. For example, specific reporting dashboards, open items, top ten customers, etc. Your finance manager might want to see open Accounts Receivable, outstanding debtors, as well as month-to-date and year-to-date profits. Users can also customise menus—let’s say to remove links that aren’t relevant. It’s easy to toggle between a custom view and the full list of items.
3. Favourites: Allows users to save common functions, tasks, documents and reports for instant access. Most actions or items can be tagged as favourites. For instance, a salesperson might add ‘Create new opportunity’ to their favourites because it’s a task they complete regularly—allowing them to jump to a ‘new opportunity’ screen straight away without navigating through multiple menu items. 
4. User-defined fields (UDF): Customising forms and screens involved in different workflows ensure that processes are more precise and the correct data is captured at each stage. Creating UDFs ensures that users can capture information relevant to their day-to-day tasks. 
5. Excellent help and search: MYOB Advanced has extensive help files and videos, and an intuitive and effective search functionality.  If a user gets stuck, the help function is easily found and provides great instruction and resources. You don’t need to know complicated search methodologies to find the information you need—if you search ‘pivot tables’ the system shows you all the different ways to create pivot tables. Simple.

A bonus sixth usability benefit: MYOB Advanced includes a number of AI-driven features that automate tasks, make intelligent searches and queries possible, and illuminate trends in order to provide recommendations.  

MYOB Advanced helps employees excel

Even though MYOB Advanced brings your team together within one unified system, one user’s screen may look vastly different from the person sitting next to them, depending on their role and responsibilities.  

Usability features and the ability to modify user interfaces in MYOB Advanced lead to a better employee experience, which, in turn, leads to improved productivity and performance.  

You won’t find a sophisticated yet user-friendly ERP solution more affordable than MYOB Advanced, or an implementation partner more experienced and approachable than Leverage Technologies. Contact us or sign-up for a demo.