The ESS portal gives your employees access to their personal data in a secure and transparent environment. As an employee you can for instance enter or change your time off period, enter an expense claim or change the personal address. This undoubtedly leads to reduction of administrative costs.

In the new simplified version of Exact Synergy, that will be available as a beta version in product update 244, we particularly focus on ESS features. One of them is Time Off.

The screenshot above is the entry part of Time Off. As you can see the screen is truly focused on getting the task of asking time off done easily. Also the user is presented the information he or she naturally needs, for instance “What is my balance?” The entry fields are linked based on the choices the employee made so the employee can quickly fill in the request and ask for approval without being confronted with unnecessary fields that may be left blank.

Now you can ‘dream’ about how to spend your personal time while entering the request instead of the think about which procedures to follow to enter a time off request. And that makes a lot more fun…

If you have any questions regarding this post, please create a comment to this article.

Image credit for the header image: neloqua.

You the end user can join us shaping the products and services of the future. You will get the opportunity to share your knowledge on various business processes, get early previews and provide feedback on early design studies and even get an opportunity to visit our new head quarters in Delft.

All users, new and loyal, from a wide range of business processes are welcome. However we typically focus only on a few functional areas at the same time and this might mean that you have to be patient with your involvement.

Your call to action:

1. If you are a prospect or customer, leave a comment below if you are interested to participate and mention your field of expertise
2. If you are a partner, create awareness among your customers for this create opportunity
3. If you are an Exact employee, promote this among the customers you work with

If you are too shy or prefer to be less visible don’t hesitate to email me on: aad.hart@exact.com and I will make sure you get in contact with the User Experience team.

We are looking forward to work with you.

 In Exact Globe you have several options to make your own process flows in the main menu. Using these options helps to focus on the things that are most important or frequently used and to have a visual insight into the process you are performing.  The visual process flow of individual orders is widely used, the process flow in the menu is used less. What is the cause of this and can we improve the user experience here?

Maybe the most well known process flow in Exact Globe is the sales order process flow for a single order: 

 It gives you relevant information of the flow of the sales order in an intuitive way. This flow is shown standard in several entry and overview applications.

Exact Globe also offers the possibility to organize your work on the main menu level into flows that are relevant for your daily work.  The most well known of these is the role bar and it is mostly used in combination with the panel menu.  It is situated to the left of the main panel menu: 

 You can define several process flows, in the example you have the logistic flow, finance and reports. The main part of the menu is still the function based menu with the functional tabs and access to all menu paths per function.

Another way of working is the explorer menu where you have your complete functional menu to the left and can create process flows in the central part of the menu:

 Experience tells us that the possibilities to show process flows in Exact Globe are not widely used. The following are 4 statements that may explain why and possible enhancements to the user interface. I am very interested to hear from you if they are correct:

1. What is often seen is that people use the default screens and settings. Could the user experience be improved when Exact offers standard role based or industry specific templates for these process flows?
2. Another reason can be the limited flexibility in creating the process flows:  At the moment you can only add menu paths from either top to bottom or left to right.  Could the user experience be improved by the ability to show multiple flows grouped in one overview?
3. An opportunity for process flows is the integration with Exact Synergy. When using Synergy and Exact Globe you often have processes that require both products. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see this flow from one screen?
4. The advantage of showing the menu in a process flow is that you have instant visual insight into the specific process flows that you as a user are responsible for. Could the usability be improved if you had a direct insight into the KPI’s of this flow in the same screen?

 Of course I am also very interested in your experience with the current user interface and possible enhancements you see!

We currently make significant investments into knowledge, expertise and research towards improved User Experiences. This is also why we are, and I admit late, working on multi-browser support and a mobile web application for Exact Synergy Enterprise. I’m very interested to learn your emotional experiences with our solutions.

Outlook is one of the main gateways to share information. The usage of email is easy and fast, although it also has some important downsides, which you are probably aware of. One of the downsides is that distribution of one email results in multiple email messages in a lot of local databases (Outlook folders). It is unclear who has and does not have the information available and when there is an update, not everybody might be aware. This is why an application like Synergy Enterprise is so important. Information is only stored once, and you can easily see who can see it. When a change is made, this is directly visible to everybody it concerns.

With Synergy Office Integration we have succeeded to have best of both worlds. Because you are so used to the MS Outlook interface, we made Synergy Enterprise available there. This means that all functionalities you know from Synergy, can now be accessed via MS Outlook.

We have introduced the Synergy toolbar in MS Outlook, which provides you exactly what you need: the options available here follow the user preferences. This means that the Synergy Enterprise options in MS Outlook are the same as the options you have using Internet Explorer.

Because you will not stop using your email, we also looked at how we could achieve a tighter integration between your emails and Synergy Enterprise. And looking to the positive feedback we received so far, I think we succeeded. We have introduced the ‘save’ button, which will give you the option to save your incoming and outgoing email to Synergy Enterprise with only 1 mouse click. If the email address is recognized, it will automatically be linked to the right contact person in Synergy Enterprise.

The email message in Outlook will be tagged, so you can easily see which emails are saved to Synergy Enterprise.

When you want to add more information to the email message, when saving it to Synergy Enterprise, you can select the ‘save as’ button to save the email message. Now you can add additional information and also create a request instantly.

Conclusion: no need to leave Outlook when you work with Synergy Enterprise. With Synergy Office Integration all your Synergy functionalities are available in MS Outlook. Next to MS Outlook we also offer a tight integration with MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and MS FrontPage.

Photo credit: Shareski

The title of this article ‘Functions & Features versus User Experience’ immediately addresses one of the key challenges of our industry. Based on market and competitive analysis, technology trends, and customer feedback many features are added to the products. This is a natural process in the product life cycle creating products that are wider and deeper in functionality. People who require this added functionality are enthusiastic and it helps them achieving their goals, however for people who don’t need the new functionality it has a negative influence on their user experience.

Every company looks for differentiators in their product and for long the number of Functions & Features was an easy way to measure against the competition. The continues addition of Functions & Features has created an arms race on features and they have lost their capabilities to differentiate, because it’s assumed that the product is rich in Functions & Features. Today the overall User Experience, is the product easy to learn and use, is the user happy and more hard to measure attributes become more important.

This all creates an enormous challenge, because adding Functions & Features for one person makes the product better, while for another person it makes the product harder and more difficult to use. Customer feedback, and we thank you for that, already shows us these conflicting perceptions of new functionality. We constantly do our best to qualify not only the added value of new functionality, but also for which percentage of the people it adds value. We try to optimize adding functionality in such a way that they are beneficial for most people using the product. We combine this with efforts to optimize and improve the experience of existing functionality. This however creates an even bigger challenge, because it requires changes in something that the users have become accustomed to.

We believe we can help you best by creating products that are rich in functionality and offer an excellent user experience. However this will not come without change and disappointments. We appreciate and look forward to your feedback to jointly work on creating these excellent experiences.

Image credit: d’n'c

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So we did quite some research with a set of customers on how they use the current screen, how many request types they have, which ones they actively used et cetera. Now that the new screen is in controlled release we get mixed feedback on one specific part, via this post I would like to open up for more feedback to make sure we deliver the right experience to you.

Our user research learned us a couple of things which resulted in these design principles for the new screen:

• an average company will have over 50 different request types
• most users use about five to ten of them frequently
• the request type categories are not very well known within the user group
• searching for a specific less frequently used request is quite cumbersome and only a limited number of users is using the search option of Internet Explorer [CTRL+F] for this
• the request ID box is only used by a limited number of user to create a new request
• the majority of the users is unaware of how to use it or what to enter in it

Based on the findings we have redesigned the looks and working of the screen with the following three key parts.

• A list of the requests most used by you as a person
• An easy way to create a request by ID and request name
• A list with all available request types

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The mixed feedback is especially on this last part. Since during our research we learned that a limited number of users where aware of the request type IDs (e.g. a Vacation request is number 103) we did not include them in the list. The ordering used to be on number but for people it is easier to scan alphabetically since the name of a request gives a better understanding than the number. For the unaware user it was hard to scan the list we learned. So our aim was to increase the readability and hence an easier recognition by just using the request names. The users which now the IDs are still served by the request creator, in this field you can either enter the code or the request name.

Via this post I hope to get more feedback on especially this part. Should the request IDs be re-introduced in the list and even more important what is for you the reason to use it? Maybe as a last remark, removing the request ID was not a goal by itself. During our user research of the last year we often got the feedback that the screens of Exact Synergy are quite loud, they offer a lot of options. Redesigning the complete request page has been done with keeping this in mind, make the screens easier to understand by offering less options and the options offered are a perfect fit for your goals. Please reply with your thoughts!