After going to the EAM show, I learned quite a bit. This show is as close to our niche that is available out there. However, much of it is still a stretch for us. While Plant Maintenance (PM) and service management (SM) share a lot of commonality within SAP, at the end of the day, it’s still quite a different audience. For example, I quickly discovered that many people within the attendees (and even the vendors) had no idea what SM was, and probably were a bit confused why I was there. At least until I explained just how similar PM and SM are in some respects. (But I’ll save that for a another post).
The first thing that really struck me at this conference was the emphasis placed on master data. Rightfully so, because like any system, master data will make or break your system. However, I often walked away from a session feeling like I was just in a college lecture where the professors preached about all the ways to make it better. I often struggled with it, because it’s not like people are trying to ignore master data, or intentionally ignore entering every bit of data. Rather, all the people that I know struggle with the balance of time vs. data. Yes, a technician could enter a lengthy description of what they did, enter in 5 different codes, correctly enter their time down to the minute for each operation. But that takes time. Is that time better spent typing in data into SAP? or moving onto the next job?
In general, my feeling is often that the system makes life more difficult in terms of data entry than it needs to be. For example, if you tell a tech they need to populate 10 fields, across 7 tabs and 3 transactions, and you aren’t even going ot make the fields required, how often do you think it will happen? Let’s all be honest here, if you don’t make it dead simple to enter in the info and make it required, it just isn’t going to happen. Techs have too many work orders to process to spend that kind of time and effort. Now, the encouraging thing I saw at the conference was that many companies have recognized this by making new mobile apps, or web apps that consolidated things down to an easy interface. Much like what I have done at JaveLLin =)
More to come in a later post,
Thanks for reading,
Mike