A Usability Study of an Enterprise Resource Planning System: A Case Study on SAP Business One

Abstract

The importance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in modern business has created a demand for ERP consultants with the appropriate competencies to implement, maintain and support these systems such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics. However, users of these systems encounter usability issues whilst learning to use the systems. Several studies have shown that the assessed user interface of these ERP systems resulted to poor usability and user dissatisfaction. Empirical studies on the usability of ERP systems, particularly for SAP B1 are limited on determining the critical success factors. This paper reports on the usability assessment of SAP B1 which investigates on the effects of the external dependent variables such as buttons, labels or terminologies, navigation, layout colors, user help and logical process. The experiment results provide considerable insights into the usability design issues of the SAP B1 Sales Module. Results were assessed by measuring the efficiency effectiveness and satisfaction followed by computing for their corresponding Single Usability Metric (SUM) for benchmarking. Thus, from the usability results of the redesigned user interface, there was a significant improvement on the sigma level.