Gamification in JD Edwards vi Google analytics

Gamification is a fairly simple concept where you try and make something fun that is not fun.  So, how are we going to make JD Edwards fun? (wait, am I saying JDE is not fun…).  Actually, perhaps the term fun is not appropriate, perhaps competitive is a better term. 

If you could inject an element of competition in your workers, perhaps they would like to win that competition and depending on how the competition is put together – you might all benefit from it.  An analogy is classic “sales volume”, where you could dashboard this by user by summing their sales orders for the day and putting it on a TV screen on the sales floor!  That’d be a nice thing.  We find that in Australia – that can go one of two ways.  People like it and get involved, or people think it’s a waste of time and don’t want the see the details up in lights – it’s a fine line.  I must admit though – competitive nature does tend to shine through…

We’re are using a metric of “clicks” or interactions with the ERP and reporting on this on a weekly basis for a mobile work order solution that we’ve written for a client.  We have an automated google analytics report that is emailed to all of the managers at the end of every week which summarises the interactions of their staff by user ID.  This has turned out to be a terrific success for getting people on the system.  It turned out to be quite competitive that nobody wanted to be at the bottom of the list, it has increased the usage of the application significantly.

We can also drill down into the detail of the usage and know that users are putting in real transactions – not just “playing”.

You can see from the above that we are seeing a healthy upward trend in usage.

We can apply the same mechanism to promote certain behaviors in ERP usage too.  We can export usage data by user and application from JD Edwards on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.  We can filter by certain applications to ensure that only valid applications are being counted towards the tally.  Regular “machine” based emails (not up to an administrator to collate) can be sent to a group which will show the new leader board.

As you can see from the above, we can see the users, the screen they are using (in this case a JD Edwards mobile application) and also how often those interactions have been over a period of time. 

This detailed analysis allows us to EASY gauge improvements in our design, whether that is navigation or new functionality.  We immediately know whether the new functionality is being used.  Who is using it (and who is not!).

You could compare departments, functional roles, geographic regions – anything!  The data can be sliced and diced in numerous ways to create a competitive landscape.