Decision making requires that we recognize a need, analyze appropriate data, and select the best alternative and take the right action. There is psychology in action here. The right action for one business will be the wrong action elsewhere. The people who will need to take action must be comfortable taking suggestions from a machine. They also must be confident that the rules we set up in the machine are almost always the right action to take. And users should understand where the suggestion might not be best.
Decision support has been a part of ERP systems since the days of MRP. The first systems produced an exception list of suggested material transactions. We saw that a purchase order should be pushed out or pulled in. We saw that a production work order was no longer needed at all. We got an alert that a material item should be deactivated and that any inventory was surplus.
These suggestions came from our MRP by the system applying heuristics or simple rules that we could control. We adjusted various parameters such as lead times, safety stock, and time fences and could control the resulting suggestions. Ideally, the buyer or production planner could safely make the suggested change and they would have made the best decision for our organization.
We can take a good ERP system of today and establish rules for other disciplines beyond material planning. Do we have all the information necessary to determine if a purchase order from our customer is sufficient to enter a sales order? ERP can help. We just finished some operation in the factory on a work order. What order and task should we pick up next? ERP can help.
Most of the guidance can still be set up through the use of setup parameters in various master data areas. These will work together to allow certain transactions and not others throughout the ERP. Today’s ERP systems also have extensive user-definable fields we can use to provide suggested actions and control transactions based on our unique needs. If master data setup proves to be insufficient, we can use business intelligence tools already in our ERP to create pop-up warnings and suggestions in any screen.
Look carefully at how your users are using ERP. Make their day easier by guiding the system and them to consistently make the best decisions. They will be more satisfied in their work and the organization will be more profitable.