Developing user manual for ERP systems: features, tools, special techniques
Dennis Craneto make it a more productive tool in thWhat is an ERP system?
An ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a software designed to bring together all the information that supports the efficient management of a company. It covers production, accounting, warehousing, transportation, human resources, customer service and other important areas of business.
Automation of processes makes work easier for employees, and the company as a whole receives a significant increase in productivity.
What are the benefits of developing a user manual for ERP?
Writing detailed and clear user manual for an ERP system is not only an errors protection. Without clear help documentation, users will not be working with the ERP system, but communicating with the support team. A complex product needs a knowledge base that not only answers all application questions, but also clearly explains the benefits of using it. When a visual aid with detailed instructions and detailed explanations of complex schematics is at hand, employee attitudes toward the ERP system begin to change. The instructions explain how the ERP takes care of routine tasks they used to spend a lot of time on, how it monitors the progress of operations. Users begin to realize the value and efficiency of the development, and the benefits of its use become obvious.
A single reference infrastructure for ERP supports self-learning for the entire team. Newcomers adapt to new business processes faster, while experienced employees improve their knowledge. A unified information system is easy to learn, develop and upd ate.
When choosing among several solutions, an enterprise is more likely to prefer an ERP system that has detailed user documentation. However, quality help should be understandable not only to specialists of a certain industry, but first of all to ordinary users, i.e. those who have questions about the functionality every day. Developing a document aimed at a wide range of readers is very difficult task.
What are the challenges of writing custom ERP documentation for company management systems?
The process of creating a knowledge base for ERP is labor-intensive due to a number of features of the company management system itself.
Multifunctionality
The range of capabilities of modern ERP systems is so wide that it covers almost all aspects of business: fr om procurement to sales, from production to finance. In order to create a quality reference base for such a massive structure, it is necessary to have at least minimal knowledge in various business spheres: logistics, finance, production, etc.
Modularity
When describing the tools, a large number of modules integrated into the system causes difficulties. It is like a huge mechanism consisting of many elements, wh ere each of them is a separate gear. To describe the operation of the whole mechanism, you need not only to know how a certain part rotates, but also to understand how they interact with each other. You need at least a basic experience of working with the system to correctly explain the work of the whole structure in general and each module in particular.
A list of some of the modules that make up an ERP system and demonstrate the complexity of enterprise management systems:
Audience structure
The ERP audience includes professionals with different backgrounds and levels of technical expertise. From a programmer who understands the subtleties of the code to a manager who works with the final result. The task of the help author is to be able to explain complex things in simple and understandable language, regardless of the level of technical literacy of users.
Updates
ERP systems evolve and are refined over years, and even decades, and you need to stay on top of all the changes. For this purpose, the technical writer should work closely with the developers and get up-to-date information about new features, bug fixes and other updates. This will avoid inaccuracies. The writer himself should also be able to use versioning tools to make sure that the user guide updates are error-free.
How to keep your documentation up to date and why it's critical, we've covered in this article.
What is important to consider when developing user manual for ERP systems?
When developing documentation for ERP systems, writers face specific challenges that distinguish this process from writing reference information for other workflow systems. Let's take a look at the key points that a technical writer will have to consider when developing.
Scale of ERP system
ERP consists of many functional areas and includes hundreds or even thousands of individual elements. To make it easy for the user to navigate, you need to spend a lot of time creating a clear and logical documentation structure. It's like creating a guidebook for a huge maze — without a reliable map, it's easy to get lost.
An example of the organization of a company management system demonstrating the complexity of interrelationships:
Integration of different modules
Integration of different business processes and information flows into one system is a key feature of ERP. Explaining exactly how data is transferred between these modules and what rules they obey is a difficult task. User manual should reveal this relationship so that the user understands how his actions in one module affect the work of other modules.
It may make sense to break down the user help itself into appropriate modules. Small and easily digestible blocks of information will help not to get lost in the array of instructions and make it easier to understand the material. It is recommended to use simple sentences without complex terminology and stick to a neutral and professional tone. A/B testing can be used to determine the most navigable layout of the documentation topics.
Business specifics
ERP is customized to the needs of a particular business, so creating custom documentation for it is always a customized approach. Previous experience can be useful, but you cannot simply copy ready-made templates, as they do not take into account the nuances of a new client's business. The content and format of the document can be significantly influenced by the specifics of the production process, consideration of regional peculiarities, tax and legal requirements.
Special techniques for creating user documentation for ERP systems
The purpose of creating a help base is to form a single source of information in which the user can find answers to all questions. But the search for answers should be convenient, and the presentation of the material should be understandable. For this purpose, it is necessary to follow some rules of writing, as well as to apply simple but effective design techniques.
Use real-world examples of how the tools work
Include examples and real-life usage scenarios in your documentation. People better absorb and remember information through concrete situations that are close to their daily work. Make the manual more visual by accompanying the content with media files. All kinds of flowcharts, graphs, photos and videos are important in any instruction, but in this case you should not just add screenshots of the interface with captions, but connect it with real cases, so that the user understands the essence of this or that tool on a live example and sees how it will help him perform the task. In order to get an idea of how to write documentation correctly, you can look at examples of design from well-known platforms.
In the example below, the Stripe service uses interactive windows wh ere you can move elements of the flowchart. The window can be opened in a separate browser tab and viewed in detail:
User feedback
Provide for the possibility of getting feedback from users. This will help to identify weaknesses in the documentation and improve it. Often authors place buttons on their pages to evaluate the usefulness of the information provided.
For example, the Twilio platform allocates a whole banner with all the necessary links for feedback:
In turn, the author himself should work in constant contact with the developers of the ERP system to know about changes in the program and reflect this in the text in a timely manner. Obsolescence and inconsistency of data with the real functionality leads to big problems in the long run.
Testing user manual
This point is closely related to the previous one. Testing documentation by users allows you to identify defects and errors that may go unnoticed during traditional editing. For example, you can offer to perform certain tasks using only the documentation and observe how easy the tasks are to complete.
Surveys and questionnaires can provide an opportunity to rate usability, understandability, completeness, and provide feedback on other aspects of the knowledge base. In group discussions, users can share their impressions and suggest ideas for improvement.
Experience in creating user documentation for ERP systems on the example of real projects
Let's listen to specialists who have successful experience in creating user documentation for their products.
ELMA business process management systems
Olga Mikheyeva, head of the documentation department of ELMA, tells us how Dr.Explain helps the company’s technical writers and technical support personnel. ELMA provides a number of software products that are frequently upd ated, and the help systems is available in four languages.
— Our company has a documentation department and employs a number of translators to create user instructions and help systems for all our products in four languages: Russian, English, Spanish, and German. It is important that the documentation creation process is as optimized as possible. The documentation department personnel should not spend a lot of time making changes to the documentation and publishing them. We created help systems using WinCHM, but it wasn’t perfect. Its major disadvantage was a very lengthy process of preparing a help system for publishing. For example, we had to work separately on the HTML layout of each help page, otherwise WinCHM would produce a mediocre design.
During the long testing, they was decided to choose a solution from Indigo Byte Systems.
— When testing Dr.Explain, we found that it produces help systems whose design is easy to customize. It meant that now we can quickly implement the design that we need. We also liked the ability to se t a status for each help topic. It was very convenient, especially in our case (we have to maintain help systems in several languages). Moreover, Dr.Explain enabled quick changing, adding, and compiling of help systems, so we finally decided to use it. All the staff of the documentation department said that Dr.Explain is very fast and much easier to use than the former solution.
As a result, two main tasks were solved: fast publication of user documentation for ELMA products and reducing the load on technical support.
Fermagri
David Román, a business process automation specialist with Fermagri, explains why Fermagri chose Dr.Explain to create help files for its business applications after trying out a few help authoring tools.
— We want to make it easy to use our ERP system, which has a complex user interface with lots of windows and input forms. A detailed user documentation can reduce the number of human errors caused by misusing the ERP system and help our employees learn to use the ERP system more quickly.
David and his colleagues used to create our help files in CHM format using simple tools. But when we migrated to Windows 10, they turned out to be incompatible with it. Moreover, they didn’t have many of the useful features available in Dr.Explain.
— Among all the help authoring tool vendors we are familiar with, the Dr.Explain team was the only one that provided our company with solid technical support for no charge. We got valuable advice even before we acquired the Dr.Explain license. Actually we had a few issues with Dr.Explain features, but we quickly resolved all of them thanks to Dr.Explain’s great technical support. The support personnel even agreed to connect to our system via a remote desktop application and help us fine-tune Dr.Explain.
Currently Fermagri is deploying newly developed help system at workstations and starting to familiarize the users with it.
Complex solutions for business processes CRM Expert
Natalia Obukhova, business analyst at CRM Expert, tells us what problems the IT company experienced without full-fledged user documentation.
— CRM Expert has been developing and implementing software on its own Global View platform for project management and production planning for 12 years. Historically, all of our projects fit within one customer's department, and all users “spoke the same language.” But the company of one of the customers grew rapidly and found itself geographically distributed across three cities. There were three departments and 26 divisions. And, horror of horrors — it turned out that “they speak different languages”, i.e. they use different terms to describe the same production processes.
Users began to flood the IT department with questions about changes in the enterprise management system, and the staff did not have time to answer them.
— We decided that we needed to improve information support for users. The system should automatically inform the user about changes and offer an easy transition to a more detailed description.
A pilot project was launched to choose between two suitable tools, and the testing identified a leader.
— At first, another system was the favorite, but the decisive factor in favor of Dr.Explain was the exclamation of the person doing most of the text transfer work: “Boom! And the entire document structure has been transferred to the help file”. The import function in Dr.Explain worked perfectly and saved a lot of time. I was also very impressed by the design of the web help, which is formed by Dr.Explain, and the beautiful way of organizing the captions to the windows of our system. In Dr.Explain this is called “Screen Annotation”. The ability to se t the status of a section was also very handy, especially after importing an old version of the help, it is easy to keep track of which sections need updating, which ones are still undergoing changes, and which ones are already upd ated and up to date.
After changing the approach to user documentation, customers started reading the help and stopped asking most of the questions.
Software for ERP data integration Data-Bond Oy
Samuli Pirkkama, the founder of Data-Bond, regards Dr.Explain as an important tool that saves time on customer support service and simplifies the user documentation update process.
— User documentation is crucial to our business in order to serve clients 24/7. Besides, it gives us the opportunity and time for concentration and development instead of spending our time on user support. Moreover, many of our clients require that user documentation to be available and updated on a regular basis. As we have found out Dr.Explain is an excellent tool for external documentation, we have started to use it for our internal purposes as well.
Samuli and his colleagues listed requirements for the tool in this order:
- Find a tool to convert Word Documentation to HTML- format.
- Document maintenance.
- Document publishing tools.
- Look and feel thing.
— Moreover, last but not the least, we found Dr.Explain as the most easy and intuitive to use. Also, to publish a document on the web is a very straightforward process that makes it possible to update documents even for a small matter. We tried several tools and very quickly it was evident to us that Dr.Explain was the number one choice for us. Word documents were converted successfully, and only minor manual work was required. The document maintenance process fulfills our needs. Besides, document web publishing is a very straightforward process.
Their next step is starting to use more Dr.Explain features to make it a more productive tool in the future.
Dr.Explain is a tool that speeds up the creation of user documentation for EPR systems
Dr.Explain is a desktop program for automated creation of user manuals. Let's take a look at its features.
Automatic annotation creation
Screen capture and automatic creation of annotations to screenshots qualitatively distinguish the program from similar products. The program creates numbered annotations for all interface elements: toolbars, menus, buttons, etc. You only need to add descriptions. You can customize the appearance of the screenshots themselves, as well as of the captions and inscriptions.
Annotation designer
A handy annotation editor offers a wide range of features for working with different types of elements, including numbered lists and endnotes.
Ready-made documentation templates
A good start is half the battle. Choosing Dr.Explain is a good start: the use of standard templates for different types of documents significantly speeds up work and unifies the design. The developers offer a choice of the four most common types of documentation:
Each template has a prepared structure of topics and a basic layout suitable for most cases.
Inserting cross-references
In Dr.Explain you can add cross-references to numbered images and tables. This helps you find the information you need quickly and helps you navigate the document better.
Collaboration
A distributed team of authors will be able to work on the same documentation using the cloud service:
Conclusion
Quality user documentation is not just a se t of instructions, but a valuable tool for improving employee efficiency and company development. It helps users to master the ERP system faster, reduces the risk of errors and serves as a repository of the organization's knowledge.
The requirements for user documentation in such a complex system as ERP are strict, so to create and maintain a reference base, you can't do with an ordinary text editor. It is necessary to use specialized tools. They automate routine tasks, significantly speed up the writing process and have a number of other advantages, thanks to which it becomes easier to convey complex material to the reader.
As we have already noticed earlier, it is impossible to use one and the same template for creating a reference base due to individual peculiarities of each business, but it is possible to use one and the same program for creating custom documentation for companies in any industry with very different business processes. Fortunately for the technical writer, there are suitable programs for this.