Would future enterprises move towards eliminating the complex UI’s that enterprise applications offer?

Assistant: “What would you like to do?”

PLM Business User: “Approve the Design Change Request DCR-49089 which is pending with me. Add a comment that I have validated the design in CAD system.”

Assistant: “DCR-49089 is approved with the comments you mentioned. Below is the link to view the approved DCR”.

PLM Business User: “Also, can you add the part PN-08234 to the BOM ASSBLY09789 at position 5”.

Assistant: “How much Quantity of the part should I add here?”

PLM Business User: “3”.

Assistant: “Sure. Would you like to specify some attribute values for optional attributes like Source and Scrap percent?”

PLM Business User: “No”

Assistant: “Ok. Great! The part PM-08234 is added at position 5 in the BOM of assembly ASSBLY09789 with Quantity as 3”

A business user of one of my recent client came up to me and revealed this conversation that took place in her dreams. She had been really struggling with the complexity induced due to the changes in the application UI after the recent release.

“Just 4 months back, I had learned how to browse the complex UI and carry out my tasks in the application. Now I see an all new application.” She complained.

This made me wonder — Why are these enterprise applications designed so complex? Why can’t we have a simple interface any user can easily get acquainted with. The “ease of use” factor, for business users or external suppliers often determine the efficiency of the business processes it caters and eventually affects the time to market for any product. Unfortunately, most of these enterprise applications including PLM have a highly sophisticated and complex UI. To add to this, there are numerous on going changes to the application screens which leave the business users nothing but confused. This necessitates regular business user training to get the users well acquainted and trained on the application.

As per Forbes, in 2018, nearly $87.6 billion were spent on corporate training in the US alone. While a part of this expenditure is necessary, the continuous application training is costly and often too much to grasp for many business users. Often, these training are followed with end user support of the application for the business users. This do add up to the costs too.

We felt the way to address this would be to have a virtual digital assistant for every business user using the enterprise application just like any business user would dream of. This assistant would not only answer user queries regarding How-To’s in the application, but also execute some tasks in the application on behalf of the user. We named this assistant or chatbot — “Ek- intelligent PLM assistant” This chat bot, Ek, asks the user for the required information to carry out certain task/s and would intelligently do it in the most appropriate manner, without the user worrying about how to do it through multiple application screens. Whenever in doubt, it will seek the necessary information from the business user and provide him various choices to carry out certain tasks. It will carry out business rules validation associated with the task it is assigned and do it in an efficient manner. It would even notify the user of any pending tasks approaching deadlines through a alert chat or a mail. The whole list of features is too long to mention here, but the possibilities are endless and configurable as per business needs.

The open source version uses Rasa framework, while the paid one uses dialogflow for building AI chatbot model. Powered with a NLP processor and a microservice architecture, currently the solution is being developed for some leading PLM applications like Agile PLM and Windchill and Flex.

We believe the future enterprises would certainly move towards adopting the recent technical trends to improve the efficiency and reduce time to market in the best possible ways.

Hopefully, this is one small step towards it!

Anup