Investigating usability issues in ERP systems : the cases of multi-UI tasks and UI validation

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are vital for managing any modern-day business. These systems aim to facilitate an organization's work by automating and integrating all business information and processes. However, ERP systems suffer from many problems that may cause an implementation failure. Many of these problems are related to usability, which is affected by the complexity of user interfaces (Uls). Usability can be defined in terms of an end-user's efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfactions. A study was conducted in this thesis to inquire about the usability problems that ERP users face. The results showed that ERP usability is mostly affected by two issues. Although other issues were identified these two issues were the most common. The first issue is related to the cases where end-users are required to navigate through many Uls in order to accomplish a task. The second issue is related to the numerous incomprehensible error messages that stress out and sometimes mislead end-users. The contribution of this thesis is divided into two parts, based on the two common usability issues that were identified by the previously mentioned study. The first part of the contribution involved conducting an empirical study to test the usability difference between accomplishing a task using multiple UI and a single adapted UI. The outcome showed that the single adapted UI saves time and users found it to be much better than the initial set of Uls. The second part of the contribution involved analyzing a sample of error messages from various SAP Business One Uls. Based on this analysis, ten types of validation rules were suggested. Then, the design of an approach for developing model-driven multi-target UI validation was presented. This approach is capable of executing validation on multiple levels including Uls, software classes, and databases.