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"Knoa® Software is leading the performance management industry with end-user experience management solutions that reach beyond infrastructure and application performance to monitor, measure and manage how end-users are utilizing the application to optimize business process execution. We are proud that our solutions are helping control costs and drive ROI in some of the world's largest and most complex software deployments."
Source : Knoa Software

Resources Related to End-User Management:

Management (Wikipedia)
End-User (Wikipedia)

The No-Drama Upgrade

End User Management is also known as : End User Experience, End User Management, End User Management Software, Need End User Management, End User Performance Management, End User Management Solutions, Identity Management, User Provisioning Management, End-User Experience Management, Benefits End User Management, Features End User Management, End User Management Module, End-User Performance Management Tool.

End-User Management can help you minimize business disruption and keep your upgrades on-time and on-budget

Ultimately, it's the end-users of upgraded applications who actually execute the transactions that drive the processes that in turn drive your business. So the most important factor in determining long-term business results from any upgraded application is how well end-users effectively execute business processes.

Executive Summary
Why manage end-user experience & performance during your upgrade
Why are Upgrades So Difficult?
Higher operational costs, higher support costs and process execution shortfalls equal big business risk
It's All About the End-users!
Successful upgrades focus on end-users ' not the applications
Maximize Upgrade ROI
Knoa EPM helps you stay on budget, reduces support costs and helps you avoid business disruption
Optimize the Upgrade Life Cycle
Knoa EPM helps you baseline, plan, test and deliver your upgrade
Upgrade Objectives, Challenges and Solutions
The impact that real end-user experience and performance metrics can have on specific upgrade challenges
Are You Ready For the No-Drama Upgrade?
Four questions to help you evaluate the potential value of Knoa EPM for your application upgrade

Executive Summary

If your organization is upgrading or planning to upgrade your enterprise software this year, the stakes are high. When you upgrade your enterprise application software, you want to realize expected benefits as quickly as possible and minimize the costs, disruption and risk to the business. In these tough economic times, there is absolutely no room for budget overruns and the potential disruption to business operations that are the ever-present companion risks of a software upgrade.

Risk mitigation and management are absolutely mandatory. You need to ensure your end-users can still do their jobs during and after the upgrade. You also need to ensure that critical business tasks and transactions (such as order entry and order management) are properly maintained after the upgrade. End-User Management solutions from Knoa Software can help you realize expected Return on Investment (ROI). The software provides detailed reports that identify, prioritize and recommend action on end-user experience and performance issues that impact adoption and effectiveness. You gain the data and insight needed to simultaneously optimize the performance of your upgraded enterprise applications and the people who are using those applications to drive the core processes of your business.

Business executives have actionable insight to drive the highest possible levels of adoption and efficient, effective, and compliant use of their enterprise applications. CIOs have comprehensive insight into application usage and performance to make informed decisions about where to deploy resources to improve solution performance and effectiveness.

Why Are Upgrades So Difficult?

As noted by Gartner Inc., enterprise software upgrades can cost up to 30% of the original software installation price. Upgrades can result in "hidden" ' but also very controllable ' costs that limit return on investment (ROI). These include:

Higher operational costs: Upgrades can be disruptive for end-users, since they may be expected to change the way they work. Initially, performing everyday tasks ' for example, entering orders or closing the general ledger ' may actually take longer.
Higher support costs: If you don't identify and address user issues before the software is deployed broadly, end-users may end up making far more calls to help desks and IT support teams than they need to. They may not know how to use the software properly or think that it's not working correctly. Or they may run into performance problems. In either case, support costs increase. ROI can also be impacted because IT doesn't have the information needed to prioritize fixes and training needs. In most cases, the squeaky wheel gets the grease ' sometimes at the expense of a "silent" problem impacting a larger user population that ' if addressed ' would yield higher or faster ROI.

Even more costly, is the often hidden impact on business results ' the business disruption that often accompanies or follows a software upgrade. These include:

Process Execution Shortfalls: Other issues can also limit the ROI you realize from your upgrade. For example, users may end up developing inefficient work-arounds for process steps that the software should streamline and support ' extending process execution times and impacting business results. Sometimes these types of issues resolve themselves as users become more familiar with the software, learn from their mistakes, and adjust to change. But in other cases, these events preclude you from realizing expected benefits from an upgrade.
Impact on Key Performance Indicators: Executives often approve an upgrade to improve a top-line key performance indicator ' such as reducing the order-to-cash cycle, or improving customer satisfaction. All too often, they find that the expected business results aren't forthcoming. This may occur because users don't know how to use new functionality correctly or be the result of some unforeseen inefficiency in a complex business process.

Get the Answers to Critical Questions Knoa EPM captures metrics needed to address some of your most critical user performance questions, such as:

Are my employees able to execute critical business processes effectively and efficiently?

Has our training program led to real results?
Where do we need to focus additional training efforts?

Are the key business processes that require tracking for policy or regulatory compliance being performed properly, and is there an electronic audit trail?

Is our enterprise application performing effectively for the people using it?

Where are the specific issues, what is causing these issues, and what is the impact on our operations?

It's All About the End-users!

Successful upgrades are focused on end-users ' not just applications. Historically, companies have overlooked the need to manage end-user performance. Why? Because IT departments responsible for planning and executing upgrades tend to focus on application issues, such as software quality and scalability, or technology, such as ensuring a stable infrastructure for applications. However, application stability and performance are just a few of the many drivers of ROI from application upgrades. Investing in application performance is all for nothing if you don't build and sustain adoption and ensure efficient, effective use of the applications.

Adopt and use the upgraded application
Be able to effectively execute the key functions for their specific role
Quickly reach a level of proficiency to limit negative business impact after the transition

The good news is that there's a new generation of solutions providing accurate insight into these variables: end-user experience and performance management solutions. These solutions give you a new focus on end-user adoption, utilization and performance because they capture a complete picture of end-user experience and behavior.

Regardless of how stable your infrastructure is, an application is "not performing" ' from the end-users' perspectives ' whenever they are unable to effectively execute the key processes required for their role.

Maximizing ROI with Knoa Experience & Performance Manager

Knoa Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) accurately determines how each employee uses your upgraded enterprise application, both during user acceptance testing and after go-live. Leveraging real-time user data, you can generate comprehensive reports that help you identify where you need to improve application response times, invest in training and adjust business processes. Equally important, you can help ensure that employees are using the application in ways that will deliver all the value you expected from your upgrade investment.

This analysis is made possible by the application's unique functionality that can capture:

Actual user-experienced response time metrics: Which transactions are slow and inefficient, resulting in lower employee productivity? Knoa EPM provides a user's view of system response at the individual transaction level, giving you the insight and information you need to proactively manage application performance.
Comprehensive system and application error metrics: What application quality or infrastructure issues are impacting the end-users? Which are not? Knoa EPM captures metrics on 100% of the errors that are presented to end-users, so you can identify and prioritize remediation efforts.
Comprehensive application utilization metrics: Have the employees adopted the new functionality of the upgraded application? Knoa EPM provides detailed information about how employees utilize your enterprise apps, including what transactions they are using, how long they spend on them and what steps they follow.
Comprehensive end-user error metrics: What critical errors do your end- users encounter? What training is required? Which individual users need specific assistance or more training? Knoa EPM tracks and reports 100% of all errors created by your end-users and provides contextual information about the actions that led to the problem.
User Behavior and Performance: Are end-users executing the transactions the way they were designed? Knoa EPM lets you track the specific performance of end-users before, during and after transaction execution.

"Many ERP implementations fail to deliver the expected business result because companies pay insufficient attention to the training, change management and end user support that will drive the sought-after business performance improvements. Companies need to consider the deployment of tools and processes that give insight into real end user experience and actual performance to highlight problem areas where proactive measures can be applied to drive maximum business success ' at the time of implementation and throughout the deployed life of the software application."
' Pat Phelan, Research Director, Gartner, Inc.

Using End-User Metrics to Optimize the Upgrade Life Cycle

Delivering Value Every Step of the Way

Knoa EPM can play a key role in ensuring the success of your upgrade by providing value at the following stages:

Pre-upgrade baselining
Upgrade planning
User acceptance testing
Going live
Post-deployment baselining

Pre-Upgrade Baselining

Before beginning your upgrade, use Knoa EPM to measure your current response times, error rates, and other key end-user metrics. For example, you can use this data to answer questions such as:

How efficiently are our end-users are executing tasks within the existing software (before the upgrade)?
What transactions and processes are most heavily utilized? What is the average performance profile for those transactions?
What application quality level is experienced by the end-users?
Who are the power users?
Who are the key stakeholders to engage in the planning and rollout of the upgraded system?

Armed with this information, you can establish a baseline measurement and create a development and project plan that assigns priority to the highest impact areas within the application and end-user population.

Planning

Leveraging the baseline metrics provided by Knoa EPM, you can access the business impact of custom and modified transactions before investing application development resources in bringing them forward to the new release. You can identify the most heavily used areas of functionality and focus training resources where end-users will experience the most change. Similarly, if you have customized functionality that Knoa EPM shows is rarely used, you can make the decision to go with standard functionality during the upgrade with greater confidence. The goal is to make decisions and investments that will help you optimize the new release for end-users while keeping costs under control.

You can use also use the end-user utilization statistics to see which modules and transactions are most heavily used. This gives you insight needed to optimize your application engineering and development resources.

West Trax, which provides IT consulting services to SAP customers, recently completed a ground- breaking cost-benefit study. Data was analyzed from 269 benchmarks in 13 different industry sectors. In the SAP systems analyzed, between 20% and 40% of the transactions used were customized.. More than one-third of customized developments were never used but were still maintained. On average, only 25% were intensively used.

User Acceptance Testing

Knoa EPM delivers KPI metrics and workflow that can accelerate the user acceptance testing (UAT) phase by:

Eliminating tester documentation of problems, which typically consume 25%'30% of a tester's time
Eliminating the need to reproduce a problem before beginning to analyze for its root cause

When performing UAT, you can measure how well your "testers" exercise the new business processes of the upgraded SAP application. The baseline information will allow you to develop and test real-world usage scenarios so you can detect errors and cumbersome design elements before the application is deployed. For example, you can:

Predict conflicts and errors based on real-world testing scripts
Test the intuitiveness of the interface
Prioritize resources to build the features that will have the most impact
Correct frequent issues and errors before launch
Tune training processes to target areas with the most user challenges

Going Live

When you deploy the upgraded application for all new users during the expansion phase, Knoa EPM transparently monitors actual end-user experience for all users, across all transactions, at all times. The solution captures:

Metrics on application response time and system errors, enabling you to monitor the performance of the upgraded application from the perspective of the end-user
End-user metrics (such as errors, adoption and utilization) to help you pinpoint adoption and user proficiency problems
A complete record of end-user behavior and actions, before, during and after each transaction

Using this data, Knoa EPM provides comprehensive early insight that has been proven to shorten the time between the "going live" and "implemented" upgrade phases. For example, you can:

Pinpoint transactions where users are still having execution problems ' despite having been thoroughly trained ' and take immediate remedial action
Monitor adoption in real time so that you can answer questions such as: How many users are using the application? What transactions are most heavily used? What transactions are being avoided?
Identify application performance problems or transaction failures and system errors that users encounter before the help desk calls start coming in from the user base
Quickly resolve issues reported to the help desk without needlessly interrogating the end-users

Knoa EPM gives you instant access to KPI metrics so you can benchmark response times and system and user errors to establish a baseline. Pre- and post-deployment reporting helps ensure that you can identify and report improvements from the new release and deflect inaccurate reports that the new release is causing problems.

All of the related metrics are captured in real time which eliminates the need for manual, labor-intensive assessments of the user acceptance, such as surveys and live end-user observations. These approaches are not only more costly but also only capture anecdotal or incomplete information about the user experience.

Post-deployment Baselining

The Benefits of Accurate Performance Insight

Knoa EPM monitors your current enterprise application (pre-upgrade) and your upgraded application for immediate, actionable information on closing performance and training gaps, fine-tuning of processes and documenting the ROI and value of the upgrade. While specific outcomes vary, customers can typically:

Identify end-user issues and root causes early ' during the upgrade process itself ' so they can be addressed before going live
Link the success of training investments to actual employee performance
Reduce application and user errors, lower primary response issues and significantly decrease end-user support costs and expensive help desk calls
Determine where to improve application response, leading to increased user productivity and lower cost of ownership
Use the electronic audit trail to help track employee compliance in key business processes
Accurately benchmark the before-and-after impacts of the upgrade on key performance indicators (KPIs) used to assess ROI

Most importantly, Knoa EPM provides critical, accurate, real-time data to drive maximum value from your upgraded enterprise application. Business executives have actionable insight to drive the highest possible levels of adoption and efficient, effective and compliant use of the upgraded applications. CIOs have comprehensive insight into application usage and performance to make informed decisions about where to deploy resources to improve solution performance and effectiveness.

Upgrade Challenges and Solutions

Improving Application and End-user Performance for Higher ROI

Knoa EPM helps you drive end-user adoption and sustain efficient, effective, and compliant application use by improving the experience the application delivers to your end-users. Equally important, it enables you to improve the performance and results achieved by those business users ' the key to realizing expected ROI.

Knoa EPM can help you proactively address the business challenges associated with upgrades. The following table summarizes how the solution solves these issues and challenges in more detail.