Great Business Software is F.I.R.M. (Part 1 of 4)

Great business software is Frictionless!

Have you seen a scenario similar to this?  Acme Medical Device Company leases a medical testing device to customers and can't match up all the leased devices with customers.  Dozens are "missing in action."

Customers call requesting a device and need it to be shipped out immediately.  The company employee acts heroically.  They calibrate the device, package it, and ship it.  Then they procrastinate recording the device id and the customer it went to because the business software was is cumbersome to use, that things would start to pile up if they took the time to use it.  The employee thinks, "I'll put everything into the system before I go home."

This is not Frictionless.  Even though there is a place inside the system for all the information, the system may "hang" or lock up while people are trying to use it.  Maybe the design requires the user to jump around the system to input information.  Maybe it requires several mandatory steps that don't add value to the process. 

Frictionless is easy to use.  People love frictionless.  In this case, frictionless might mean that when the customer calls, it is easy to create a new customer profile while on the phone with them.  It is easy to select from an electronic inventory list the device that they need and the id number of the device is automatically assigned to their profile.  Furthermore, the sytem allows a shipping label to be printed right from their customer profile simply by clicking a button.  Everything it does it does fast.

For the business owner, CEO, or CFO, the relevance of Frictionless is this.

What is it costing us to not have Frictionless systems?