The wave of the (near) future is becoming clearer: it’s all about the end user. Constantly improving business processes, information flow, and dashboards for the end user is becoming the focus of most organizations who are trying to optimize efficiencies. It’s important for companies to keep adjusting and readjusting their business processes to create a perpetually agile business.

SAP is making big strides in this area (see “Will SAP Make Companies More User-Centric?”). Their most recent software announcements have focused on making it easier for business stakeholders to make critical decisions with real-time information. They’ve begun offering their CRM application in its HANA cloud, as well as offering SAP Business Suite with its HANA in-memory database. HANA, by itself, is showing tremendous growth in today’s market (see “SAP CEO: We Could Have the Fastest Growing Software Product in the History of the World.”), though it’s still in its infancy (18 months in the market).

Rapidly growing companies are finding that they need key components for successful expansion, such as real-time information, access to business processes, and analytics.  This is where software process automation plays an integral part.

Automating processes with a package like Automation Anywhere is a natural fit because of its flexible streamlining and automation capabilities, easy modification of business processes, and documentation of processes.

Companies are really looking for easier ways to access their systems, make sense of the data, and quickly generate reports that enable key decision making. These decisions are becoming more granular and frequent—in some cases daily. Given this paradigm, you can see how critical the end user decision points have become. The major software vendors (SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc) are placing a greater focus on this aspect of their software stack. The Cloud has become the heavy lifter here as well, taking much of the burden off the IT departments. For this reason, this is a great time to be an end user of business processes, such as sales order fulfillment, financial reporting, or customer retention.

My observation is that process owners and end users of systems are often tied up in the IT of their process, instead of spending more time on the interpretation of information and decision making. Too many users tell me that they’re still manually entering data, fixing system problems, or tracking codes and disparate pieces of customer/order information. Over 80% of the customers I work with see this as a problem, and want more efficiency. The universe will naturally gravitate toward these end user goals, and now we’re beginning to see it.

Have a story to share? Are you seeing an increased focus on the end user? Send me an email. I’d like to hear your opinions and observations.

To read more about SAP and automation, click here or visit: http://www.automationanywhere.com/ERP/solutions/sapautomation.htm