The Big Easy in the Oil Fields
Enterprise software, in all its mightiness and function, is sometimes at odds with mobile users, who are desperately seeking and filtering relevant information on small smartphone or tablet screens, scrolling pages, shifting interfaces and either getting lost or at the very least, losing productivity.
Consumerization of Enterprise Applications
Agility and usability of business applications is a critical and worthy challenge. A broad view on this topic was given by Gartner in their report “Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You”, stating “consumerization isn’t something to be “done,” it is a new way to view users and the tools they need to accomplish their day-to-day jobs. Viewing them as customers of your service, allows both the IT leadership and IT organization to shift from merely providing technology, to being a key success factor of the company”.
The IDG Enterprise Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise (CITE) survey highlighted already in 2014, that in 2015/2016 “organizations expect to see CITE creating a positive impact in user satisfaction, user productivity, process efficiency and collaboration, and business agility”.
Bridging Information Technology and Field Personnel with Azure
A noteworthy solution provider in this area is Zimt Apps, with their latest implementation for oil-field workers at Hess Corporation, Texas. The fundamental idea from Zimt Apps goes beyond adding a wrapper around the ERP application, it’s remodeling the user experience to free the application’s potential to increase user productivity. What does this mean? Zimt puts the pieces together to access legacy SAP on-premise environments through the cloud to deliver browser and native mobile applications. The conduit between SAP, Zimt technology and application clients is Microsoft Azure, which simplifies deployment and provides complementary services through Azure, Office 365 and SharePoint.
Seamless Business Processes from Rig To HQ
Working closely with the Hess user team, Zimt tailored the Invoice Approval App to fit over 2,500 field users. It allows them to view all relevant contextual data from SAP and approve vendor invoices from the oil field, which has streamlined the approval time per invoice from an average of three minutes to under five seconds. Additionally, the intuitive user experience and familiarity to Microsoft Outlook meant that no training was required. “It used to take navigating and switching between 16 SAP screens to see all the information needed to make an informed decision on approving invoices, which was really problematic for the guys out on the fracking rigs in North Dakota,” stated Andrew Miller from Hess. “The Zimt App now pulls all of that information on to a single pane of glass where they can quickly make an informed decision and approve the invoice with a single click – they don ́t even know they are using SAP”
The Zimt technology encompasses three key areas: (1) For completely secure and validated data entry, the Zimt Foundation provides the Microsoft Azure cloud connection. (2) The ZPacks are pre-engineered, optimized data and logic packages that resolve the complexity of SAP to deliver everything required to maximize efficiency for a specific business process. (3) Finally, the App Assemblers are the building blocks for rapidly assembling fit-for-purpose Zimt Apps, tailored to the unique needs for each client organization.
The worthy result: Zimt Apps for SAP re-invent business process participation through a more sophisticated yet simplified and intuitive user experience. Everything needed for an SAP activity is on a “single-pane-of-glass”, personalized to each business process for instant user adoption and productivity.
The figure below shows Zimt infrastructure on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, leveraging complementary Azure services and Office 365 (source: Zimt Apps, http://www.zimtapps.com/)
Balance Security and Productivity with Ease and Peace-of-Mind
As Gartner underlined in their report, “for Enterprise IT, it is a fine balance between doing what’s in the best interest for the organization and what is in the best interest for their internal users. They are responsible for securing data, yet that is balanced with providing access to that data to the right person at the right time and in a manner which is easy to consume”. Now, with Microsoft Azure’s Trusted Cloud environment, this balance is much easier to achieve, paving the way to peace-of-mind AND mobile productivity, even in the oil fields.
