Today's ERP Consultants really going through the tough time in managing their time and allocations. Resulting in the misconception, miscommunication and misunderstanding for which the consequences varies in a spectrum of low to high impact in their job.
This blog is about tool that reduces the effort of a consultant used for Solution design and Product demo which ultimately have a positive effect on productivity.
Before jumping into the product features, Let us have look into the importance of wireframing for ERP Consultants. I am trying to drill down the purpose in to 2,
1. For saving the efforts used in the development of product or solution demo.
2. For making effective communication with the developers in fulfilling the requirement.
Saving the efforts used in product or solution demo:
The common practice across the ERP consulting firms is to develop a sample solutions for pre sales product demo or solution demo to clients/ prospects. This involves in the Days and hours of development and testing efforts which is more costly from the project management perspective and pretty much harder from the developers perspective. For overcoming this, It would be better to create a wireframe and demonstrate with the help of power point slides and wireframe screens which has an equal effect in understanding of the product / solution by the clients / prospects.
Making effective communication with the developers:
ERP Consultants knows the business requirement and importance of developing the feature/functionality. And It's part of their job to convert the business requirement in to the Software's functional requirement and to communicate the same to the developers.
The Barrier here is the Functional design document created by the consultant with the tables and texts which has a very minimal visual illustrations of required screen or feature to be developed. This kind of design documents will equip the developers with a lot of queries and doubts which ultimately consumes a lot of time in the form of meetings, chats, calls and emails. For overcoming this kind of effort consumption, its better to accommodate the practice of designing a wireframe with the required fields, buttons or options and include the wireframe in the design document with the appropriate supporting text which will be self understandable by the developers.
But there's a big question again.
Do ERP Consultants really have a time to create the wireframes?
The objective of this blog is to discuss the ways of reducing the efforts right?
There's a bunch of wireframing tools in the market. The wireframing tools like Axure, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Fluid UI etc., are really for a graphic designer and UI Designers whose job is completely designing the user interface for web page and applications.
But for ERP consultants, there should be some friendly application with the simple features of wireframing. Most of the ERP Consultants are well versed with the Office applications like MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint. There should be some wireframing tool which must have a near or similar usability like an office products.
In a recent times, we tried creating the wireframes with the help of wireframing tool called PowerMockup - A Simple add in for Power point. This solves the complication in demonstrating the customized solution design to the clients and developers.
DynaRule is planning for a detailed review of this product which may demonstrate the features of wireframing that are used by ERP Consultants. Stay tuned for our next post that's gonna be a detailed review of PowerMockup and its application in creating the customized screens.