131–140 of 161 posts
Besides, no one cares about “vendor lockin”. Every company of any size has a dozen plus SaaS products they subscribe to every month.
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I've worked on a erp for a short while and I genuinely still don't know. The amount of bullshit surrounding them is certainly staggering. I now work on a large company that is about to introduce a large new erp system and is not only investing billions into that change with the mother of all vendor lock ins; but we're also internally transforming the company so that the erp will work. But no, we can't afford the two…
Can you say who? Curious who in todays market is spending billions on a new ERP. I'd think the market is pretty dry right now.
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No, I mean, like a copilot style AI assistant, the user can chat with to ask what they want to do, and either the assistant can operate and navigate the UI to the right place, or perhaps even shortcut the steps for the user by asking for questions to satisfy inputs for the thing they are trying to accomplish. An example: - user intent is to update an attribute for a component part number A21445 - user can click a cha…
This is a power-user’s nightmare. Instead of arranging things in a logical hierarchy, and enabling quick navigation thru keystrokes - just toss out making the ui make sense because the chatbot can solve all. Your job is to make a good product. AI-as-interface is just slapping a layer of randomized language parsing in between the user and bad ui. I’m not actually saying no chatbots. What I am saying is using a chatbot…
I used to work in green screen text based UIs from the 80s (TUI).
Power users didn't need search or anything else - they memorized the keystrokes to navigate the text UI and could just type key combinations to blaze through the UI faster than it could render on the screen.
I've never really seen anyone able to replicate that UI in a browser based or GUI desktop app to be honest.
Power users are a different use case, although the end goal is to remove the need for clicks.
I don't believe chatbots/AI assistants are a panacea, definitely encourage the architects of this new ERP platform to weigh the pros and cons.
That said, two jobs back I worked for a major manufacturing company that used the old GUI destop based Oracle EBS ERP. To automate repetitive workflows they were trying to implement UIPath (RPA automation - it drives the UI for the user) on top of the GUI.
This is what lead me to believe that if the ERP application's functionality is discoverable by an AI assistant, it can be used to automate or navigate on behalf of the user, or as part of complex workflows.
That can be done later after the basics are addressed - my only advice would be to just consider it sooner, even if you don't build it first.
It's a little easier to think of how one might simplify the workflows and design for automation into the core of the product, via the UI, APIs, etc earlier than later.
But in general - focus on the user's needs first and different roles/personas - just don't completely ignore new types of automation workflow opportunities (i.e. AI assistants/chatbots).
My opinion only.
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No, I mean, like a copilot style AI assistant, the user can chat with to ask what they want to do, and either the assistant can operate and navigate the UI to the right place, or perhaps even shortcut the steps for the user by asking for questions to satisfy inputs for the thing they are trying to accomplish. An example: - user intent is to update an attribute for a component part number A21445 - user can click a cha…
really appreciate you taking the time to write this! we've started trying to work through adding agents like this: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1903047303180464586 the trouble is that there are 1000s of possible mutations -- and the quality of an agent tends to diminsh with the amount of "tools" you give it. i need to figure out the right abstraction for this.
I agree with the right abstraction and it's tough to find the balance- in our data pipeline app, what we did is make key core functionality of the app exposed so the assistant can use it, and implemented a handful of basic agents out of the box, including one default one that could shell out work to others. We also made it easy as an extension point for users to add a new agent that used the core functionality/tools, just by defining the agent in a markdown file.
We found starting small for critical use cases that saved the most time, but thinking about building blocks, was useful.
Because the responses of the AI assistant come back and are processed on the UI, we found we could give the LLM our UI docs as well as knowledge about UI element IDs, etc so it could respond with input commands that would drive the UI.
This way, we could do something like, provide the LLM with the input/prompt including the context of like - what page/view is the user on, what is their intent, what tools are available in general, what sub agents are available for specialized tasks, etc.
Please don't let my suggestions sway you away from core progress in your app (take with a grain of salt). But it's great you're already experimenting- keep your eyes open if you see a great use case where it accelerates workflow.
Another HNer mentioned people not reading docs- that's a low hanging fruit use case we had too - "how do I use this view?", "what does this field mean?", or retrieving information from other parts of the app without having to navigate away, etc. It can save having to find answers in a doc or navigate elsewhere.
Edit: perhaps a useful exercise - imagine a workflow of "talking to the app to achieve a task" as a way to explore.
"Hey ERP, open the part entry screen for part 12345"
"Hey ERP, can you update the description for part 12345 to correct the spelling error?"
"Hey ERP, how many of widget XYZ are in stock? If there are enough in stock, can you transfer quantity 10 from warehouse A to B?"
"Hey ERP, how do I cancel a sales order?"
"Hey ERP, how does this screen work?"
I think if you break these down, you'll find common abstractions that map to features, API endpoints, user interface sequences and interactions, triggering workflows, looking things up in docs, etc.
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Oh that brings memories! Been in quite a few of those. Basically the ERP vendor sells you the software and estimates that you need a couple months and a couple consultants for the migration and integration, plus a few users of your product as guinea pigs. It is expensive as heck but well, at least it is only two months (plus hotels, plane and food). After two months you’re halfway done according to the vendor but you…
I've seen this balloon to hundreds of consultants. It can break a company. You get huge sunk cost into you're continually 90% done ERP and management either doubles down to spend one year to just get it barely working and stop, or cancel it.
The companies themselves are to blame, too: they absolutely refuse to change their processes, so the software must adapt to them, no matter what the cost.
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Oh that brings memories! Been in quite a few of those. Basically the ERP vendor sells you the software and estimates that you need a couple months and a couple consultants for the migration and integration, plus a few users of your product as guinea pigs. It is expensive as heck but well, at least it is only two months (plus hotels, plane and food). After two months you’re halfway done according to the vendor but you…
> Oh that brings memories! Been in quite a few of those. Hey! I was just on the receiving end of that. Twice! Its still the same.
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really appreciate you taking the time to write this! we've started trying to work through adding agents like this: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1903047303180464586 the trouble is that there are 1000s of possible mutations -- and the quality of an agent tends to diminsh with the amount of "tools" you give it. i need to figure out the right abstraction for this.
I pray you focus on your core product and don’t fall into an agentification rabbit hole. If you do want everything to be automatable take a page from Blender and give every action a key binding plus a Python method, so Python scripts can take the same actions a human would, but as function calls instead of clicks. Then maybe maybe maybe you can have a text field that allows natural language to transform to an action,…
Genuine question though - have you implemented an AI assistant/chat interface recently using LLMs on top of a UI?
I agree it can be a rabbit hole, but I just got through doing it on an app and there were definitely some things it really made way simpler and some complex scenarios that I'm not sure could have been done any more simply.
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The current offerings, like SAP, GE tools, etc.. Are so over-complicated and bloated, that most of the money spent is just to figure out how to configure them. Most people hate SAP but don't know what to do. Caught in catch-22, they hate it, but don't trust any other options.
== Most people hate SAP but don't know what to do. Caught in catch-22, they hate it, but don't trust any other options== I think it is worth pointing out a little nuance I learned while working at SAP. - The IT department tends to hate SAP due to its insane complexity and never-ending configurability. - The business users (procurement, A/P, finance, etc.) tend to like it because once it is set up, it “just works” for…
I've seen the sausage being made, so no longer want to eat it.
But the users, still think it is good enough. They don't see the ugliness on back end.
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This is a power-user’s nightmare. Instead of arranging things in a logical hierarchy, and enabling quick navigation thru keystrokes - just toss out making the ui make sense because the chatbot can solve all. Your job is to make a good product. AI-as-interface is just slapping a layer of randomized language parsing in between the user and bad ui. I’m not actually saying no chatbots. What I am saying is using a chatbot…
Chatbots would be great for discoverability, especially if you have a ton of docs that nobody seems to read.