Remember when Facebook was a trendy website that college students used to keep track of classmates both while in school and after they graduated? What was once a basic yearbook-type of site is now one of the most widely-visited social media sites. More than one billion people visit Facebook pages each month, and 1.74 billion users are active on Facebook via a mobile device.

Social media has changed the way we interact with friends and strangers alike. Oddly enough, the ease with which anyone can navigate a social media site to connect, promote, and gather information is becoming the bar by which we measure other software we use. Modern workers demand that business software be as intuitive and easy-to-use as a standard social media platform and modern ERP vendors are listening, providing users with access to check on operations around the clock and share information in an accessible messaging format.

Organizations recognize the need for collaboration and harnessing the power of the consumerization of ERP to change business behavior. According to the Aberdeen Group, businesses that embrace social platforms within their business systems (such as ERP) are 2.5 times more likely to gain real-time visibility into the status of all processes and to have real-time collaboration across divisions and departments. These same businesses have also seen profit margins increase by 22 percent in the past two years.

The end goal of any ERP solution provider must focus on optimizing the customer’s business. Perhaps most notably, SYSPRO has embraced social business by evolving user experience, engagement, and collaboration solution.

SYSPRO Harmony Working in Concert

SYSPRO Harmony is the answer to the modern-day social workforce. Embedded within SYSPRO, Harmony incorporates a familiar social media-type interface for doing business and is designed to simplify the user experience and increase user engagement.

Through a rules-based engine, SYSPRO Harmony uncovers and pushes relevant business and operational information to the right people, encouraging enterprise-wide collaboration, which in turn improves productivity throughout the organization.

It also enables integration of SYSPRO data into the chat format, along with archiving and conversation trend analysis. This provides users with powerful capabilities, including: following and tracking key data; communicating relevant information to internal and external stakeholders; archiving and trend analysis of conversations; and detecting of surface sentiments.

A More Social Future

There’s no doubt that the familiar social interaction experience within SYSPRO Harmony is the key to ERP collaboration, allowing users to share with other colleagues or departments, but it doesn’t stop there. The future could very well bring this extended interaction to supply chain partners, improving collaboration across the complete chain. This in turn will give suppliers, salespeople, and customers greater and more immediate access to data, deepening customer and supplier relations.

SYSPRO Harmony has several upgrades already set to release, including the ability to better drill into the information generated, allowing users to slice and dice Harmony data based not only on business context (“show me customer of sales related things from the past week”) but also on sentiment (“show me everything with a negative sentiment in the past month”).

Other upcoming enhancements include a stronger integration between Harmony and SYSPRO ERP. This means that in the future, a user may be able to open a customer inquiry directly from that customer’s recent complaint tracked and promoted by Harmony. Data Sentiment will then give companies a 360-degree look at a customer’s opinion of their services or products, promoting more informed and more strategic decision making. These updates will only serve to continue the transparent relationship between you and your market, differentiating your brand and establishing your business as ethical, honest, and customer-centric.

Use What You Know and Love

ERP systems are already such a vital part of doing business. Why not harness what your employees already know and love about social media feeds to improve how information and updates flow across your company?

Not sure where to start? PositiveVision can show you the way. From implementing SYSPRO ERP to connecting with SYSPRO Harmony, PositiveVision can help you realize the consumerization of your ERP, making it more accessible and providing more value to every user in your company. Let’s get started today!