As companies worldwide adjust to the ‘new normal’, there’s no doubt workflows will get reinvented. A key requirement for IT decision makers is to analyze worker productivity and engagement with enterprise software suites. Not just that, amid the crisis, ITDMs need ways to manage employee experience management, user enablement, and worker efficiency. User Experience Management (UEM) software can improve the utilization and profitability of a company’s enterprise software investment.
Toolbox catches up with Brian BernsOpens a new window , CEO of Knoa Software to understand how UEM is applied to a range of use cases — worker efficiency, user enablement, user adoption, employee experience management, Help Desk, and RPAOpens a new window among others.
Key takeaways from the interview:
- How UEM software can increase productivity employee productivity
- Improve help desk KPIs including mean time to resolution (MTTR)
- Provide complete visibility into front-end processes
Here’s the edited transcript of the interview with Brian Berns
1. In the enterprise applications landscape, where does UEM fit in the IT Service Management landscape (ITSM) and what is the strategic value it delivers to ITDMs?
User Experience Management (UEM) tools play many roles in this landscape. Our product, Knoa UEMOpens a new window , provides insight into employee interactions with enterprise software suites. Some of the largest and most advanced companies and organizations throughout the world have used our user behavioral analytics to improve employee and process efficiencies and workflow, reduce HelpDeskOpens a new window issues, and improve user engagement.
By providing instant visibility into the issues impacting production users, Knoa UEM enables customer support teams to take a more proactive role and address end-user needs more quickly. HelpDesk operations leverage UEM analytics to improve support service-level agreements through automation. Some of our customers have integrated Knoa UEM with their ITSM solutions, such as ServiceNow.
2. For ITDMs, how does UEM address critical initiatives such as analytics, automation and digital transformation?
Knoa UEM provides a unique set of user behavioral analytics in support of automation, digital transformation, HelpDesk support, user efficiencies, training, and WFHOpens a new window support.
For digital transformation, Opens a new window Knoa UEM is uniquely positioned to reduce the overall project time and effort in order to ensure success. By leveraging Knoa UEM in the project phase, customers develop more effective user acceptance testing (UAT), improve communications and training, and ensure process adoption and compliance, enabling a quicker path to end-user sustainment. Knoa UEM enables the identification of not only system and performance issues but also user errors, which are responsible for the majority of problems post “go-live,†and are typically undetected or unreported.
For automation projects, Knoa UEM is in a unique position to provide complete visibility into front-end processes and tasks that lend themselves to automation. Knoa user analyticsOpens a new window can be used to identify multiple automation targets, including:
- A range of applications and transactions used in the execution of most common tasks, which can be linked through automation.
- Tasks that are prone to human error, which can be eliminated through automation.
- Routine tasks with a low degree of variability, where human effort can be entirely offloaded to robots.
Since Knoa UEM generates its data from interactions with a live application user interface (UI), it can also be leveraged to monitor the tasks executed by actual robots. Specifically, Knoa can be used to:
- Measure the frequency of robot-executed tasks across all application environments
- Compare the productivity of human-driven transactions vs. their robotic counterparts
- Detect error conditions encountered by robots and collect relevant diagnostics to help improve their resilience
- Continuously monitor robot-UI interactions to proactively detect conditions that lead to failure, such as when the application UI changes
Finally, Knoa’s user data is equally relevant for business stakeholders of robotic process automation (RPA) projects. Since Knoa measures the actual utilization of the production system by real employees, it can be used to quantify the potential financial benefit (expressed in terms of productivity gains) for any RPA initiative. This can be used to secure management buy-in for initial or future RPA investments.
3. Has COVID-19 accelerated the need for employee productivity solutions analytics solutions in organizations? How do these solutions address inefficiencies and improve workflows?
The coronavirus pandemicOpens a new window forced over 300 million people to work from home practically overnight. As a result, enterprise organizations are scrambling to adapt their business and equip employees with the tools they need to remain productive, especially in remote working environments.
But questions remain: Are employees as productive at home as they were in the office? Are they able to complete their work? And how are organizations supposed to know?
UEM solutions help management, IT and HR departments answer these questions by gathering actionable intelligence on employee interactions with their enterprise software. They can help ensure employee productivity by identifying performance challenges and expediting problem resolution all within a centralized dashboard. In addition to pinpointing the root causes of technical issues and expediting issue resolution with real-time workflows, UEM software can reveal whether employees are able to function efficiently or if they are frustrated and taking longer to complete their tasks. They can also help organizations deliver an optimal application experience so remote workers can perform effectively, stay engaged, and meet the changing needs of today’s business environment.
Learn More: SAP Targets Disrupted Sectors With S/4HANA Cloud 2005 ReleaseOpens a new window
4. With remote work becoming a reality, how can businesses use UEM and what are the key technical metrics offered by software?
Businesses can use UEM to monitor the efficiency of their remote users’ application utilization.
Specifically, they can use the software to:
- Ensure optimal productivity of remote users
- Proactively identify struggling users
- Validate and prioritize issues reported to help desk
- Expedite issue resolution with real-time workflows
5. What are the key benefits of Knoa’s software and how does it address critical gaps highlighted?
Knoa UEM for Enterprise Applications provides enterprises with the visibility to drive adoption and optimize their workforce. It offers insight into how employees interact with applications, helps measure impact on day-to-day operations, and ultimately increases adoption to remediate inefficiencies and save money. In short, it enables organizations to identify the complexities of key business functions, and deliver a road map to enable users to be more productive, responsive and engaged.
With Knoa UEM, businesses can measure application adoption and utilization, user experience and performance, and step-by-step executions of business workflowsOpens a new window – all from a true end user perspective. In doing so, companies can identify training opportunities, application usability or performance issues, process improvement opportunities, and process compliance issues. Knoa’s user analytics provide the ultimate visibility into the factors impacting workforce productivity, so management and HR departments can make data-driven decisions.
6. Currently Knoa’s solution is bundled with SAP as SAP UEM. Can you share how the integration provided insights into monitoring and optimizing SAP environments, both from an end-user perspective and business impact?
SAP UEM by Knoa provides user experience metrics for all SAP business modules, including finance, HR, supply chain, sales, customer service, operations, and distribution, customer relationship management, and others. Recently, global market intelligence firm IDC conducted an extensive study of organizations that use SAP UEM, and discovered that the solution delivers significant ROI. For example, organizations utilizing SAP UEM reported an average five-month payback period, 30% more efficient management of business processes, and 15% gross productivity gain.
Organizations are increasingly using SAP UEM to facilitate S/4HANAOpens a new window migration projects, because it is useful through every phase of the integration. Pre-migration, it helps IT prove ROI on a small scale before embarking on the full-blown SAP S/4HANA implementation. It then helps spotlight business-critical issues that should be addressed during the migration, and provides the opportunity to make needed adjustments to outdated, inefficient and complex processes before simply moving them onto a new S/4HANA platform. Post-migration, SAP UEM enables management to measure user adoption to identify gaps or training issues.
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7. Can you highlight use cases outside of SAP, how companies are deploying Knoa UEM and its business impact?
Our customers include all industries, including utilities, distribution, retail, healthcare, pharma, manufacturing, government, etc. There are a wide range of use cases for which Knoa has been implemented, and also a wide range of operational or functional areas such as call centers, HelpDesk, remote employee support, customer service, operations, HROpens a new window , etc. The use cases for SAPOpens a new window and non-SAP environments are very similar. Our analytics and insight into user behavior, and the value they provide, are not limited to a specific application.
Do you think the usage of UEM software will grow? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!