mySAP™ ERP For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Raising the Bar on Productivity

In This Chapter

• Enhancing usability with control centers

• Integrating your enterprise work in Microsoft Office

• Taking a role-based approach

• Providing your managers and employees with self-service options

• Using shared service centers to relocate activities for lower cost

• Making the most of business process outsourcing

One of the big challenges to business today is to reduce the cost of standard business processes (those processes like running the payroll or processing invoices that are unglamorous but keep your doors open). Cutting these costs means reducing the total cost of ownership (or TCO, which is covered in more detail in Chapter 10) of your IT systems, including lowering costs associated with user productivity.

In an ESA-enabled environment, ERP can provide great tools to lower your TCO and increase productivity through improved usability with better access to applications and data, and the capability for self-service. These two tools can help your employees get their work done much more efficiently.

Out-of-the-box generic and industry-specific best practice scenarios can help streamline your processes and give you the ability to flexibly modify any process. You can also use shared services centers to centralize or outsource pieces of your processes, which can save you big dollars.

Upping Your Usability

You can give your employees all the software in the world, but if they can't use it easily, they won't be very productive. Usability is all ...