One of the biggest problems in most business applications is user adoption.  Getting the users to use the system is a key challenge in many applications.  So how does the business applications market combine the social media attraction to a financial or manufacturing system?  Combining a social media approach to a business management system would seem to be a logical conclusion.  But there are obstacles.   You have two different elements playing here.  The cold hard facts of transactional data and the emotional connectedness of the social media.  How can these gel together?

Salesforce.com has begun a trend in combining social media with a business application through their Chatter application.  Essentially, Chatter is a Twitter for Salesforce.com.  It is an embedded part of Salesforce.com.  Users can post status updates and see all of the updates from their chosen connections (friends).  But the power of this application is that you can follow business objects within Salesforce.com such as Accounts, Opportunities, Contracts, etc.  So anytime an update occurs on these objects, you get a status update, not from a friend, but rather from an application.

So how would this likely work in an ERP solution?  First you could enhance any alerts to post to a status page.  Next you could potentially use it to notify you on any changes to any master record, such as customer, supplier, inventory, or BOMs.   The next thing you might consider is to have criteria based alerts be in the form of status updates.  Post an update when a customer exceeds their credit limit, or post an alert when a critical inventory part is below its optimal stocking level.

The next logical extension of this would be to extend the ERP to the social web.  Imagine getting private posts on Facebook when your major customer falls past due or when your shipment that absolutely must go out notifies you that it shipped on time.

The problem with this whole concept is the ability for traditional client server based ERP solutions to move in this direction.  Some of the new systems (or recently re-written) solutions may be able to implement this type of functionality quickly, but some of the older technology solutions may have difficulty bringing a social media function quickly to bear.

As this is a topic with no clear solution yet, what do you our readers think?  Where is this going?  When will we see it?  Please post your comments and thoughts.  Thank you.

Social ERP? is a post from: ERP and More!

I just found out about Salesforce.com’s new product offering called “Service Cloud.” This offering allows an organization to tap into the power of various social networks such as Twitter or Facebook and utilize the information generated by the users of these tools to provide both content and feedback that can be reused and reshared within a service organization and partners.

I know that was a mouthful, but perhaps this video will explain it better:

http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud/

I have a client who has about 60 employees, running two different business units. They are using Salesforce.com to manage their clients, partners, vendors, constituants, and others.

They are now looking at adding issue management through Salesforce.com’s Case functionality and using the force.com platform to develop a timesheet and expense tracking system.

All of this is done “in the cloud”. What is Cloud Computing? This video will help explain it.