EVS Blog

 In this series I’m showcasing how clients have used our z.Find Enterprise Application Search (EAS) in innovative ways to find information in their ERP.  I’ll introduce this next concept with why z.Find is such a big deal.

Traditional ERP software requires a user to navigate modules, groups, tasks, reports, etc in a tree format to find data.  For instance, I’m looking for a sales order by customer PO number, I have to do the following:

1) Know that the information resides in the Sales Order module

2) Navigate to the Sales Order Module,

3) then go to Insights,

4) then to Explore,

5) then to the specific Explorer that has the information – this is the tricky part

6)  then proceed to enter report parameters:  Cust PO Number equals ‘xxxxx’

7) finally I hit the ‘go’ button and get the answer

This is the way ERP navigation has been since it’s inception 30 years ago.    Ten years ago, GoogleTM changed the way we think of finding information outside of ERP with the concept of unstructured search.  If I want to know the Detroit Tigers game schedule, I don’t have to go to a website and hit:  Sports –> Baseball –> Professional –> Detroit Tigers –> Schedule –> Spring Training, I simply type something that resembles ‘Detroit Tigers schedule’ in Google and get the answer.

z.Find brings the unstructured search that you are used to using outside the ERP into the ERP.  On a side note, GoogleTM searching that works for websites will not translate into databases and our z.Find is made by EVS specifically for ERP searches we don’t use any GoogleTM components (people always ask me that question).

One of our innovative clients who uses z.Find thought it would be helpful to ‘trick’ our search engine by adding hash tags to their data.  In layman’s terms, hash tags are a way to mark related data – my fellow Tweeps use hash tags all the time.  For instance, I want to see all of our open accounts receivable invoices.  z.Find wasn’t really built to give that type of result but my data crawlers can be told to add a tag ‘#OpenInvoice’ to all open orders it finds (aka a hash tag).  Now in the search window of z.Find an end user can type a search query of #OpenInvoice and the z.Find will show all open invoices and only open invoices.  Brilliant!

Now, not only can you find the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack’ – a unique piece of data in your ERP but you can also find groups of data with the same ease.  Think open RMAs, open support tickets, cash collected today, invoices >$10,000….anything.

This is another example of how the creative potential of the masses far exceeds that of a small group.

zFind Client Innov # Tags

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The brilliance of Apples iPhone/iPad is that it provides numerous physical tools (accelerometer, speakers, microphone, touch screen, camera, etc) and a development environment for those tools. Apple then gives these tools to the general public to invent new applications. The general public has developed some amazing applications that Apple never would have considered if they were the sole applications developer.

Realizing that the creative potential of the masses is greater than that of a focused few led us to step out of the normal ERP software development mindset of defined requirement-feature-function-benefit with target audience. The thought was to provide a tool that indexes, searches and launches screens to clients and resellers and see what business issues they could solve. This tool is our z.Find Enterprise Application Search (EAS).

The z.Find performs unstructured searches of your ERP database. For example, a customer wants to know the status of their order but only has their PO number (not your sales order number). You can simply type the PO number into z.Find and it will return every instance of that number from your ERP and will return the results by context (AR, AP, SO, PO, etc) and by rank/relevance. From there you can launch an ERP screen.

Now that z.Find EAS has been on the market for over a year we have seen resellers and clients use the tool in innovative and interesting ways that we at EVS never would have considered when we designed the product. This series highlights some of these innovative ideas.

Case #1 – ERP Data Migration

Prior to z.Find, companies had two choices with data in their legacy ERP: 1) Convert it to the new ERP (which is costly and time consuming) or 2) Keep it in the old ERP and maintain a live version of the old ERP to access when necessary. Most companies do a hybrid of the two.

One of our clients concluded that if he could access his current ERP data with z.Find that he should be able access the data from his old ERP with z.Find too. With the tools provided by z.Find, this client was able to index both databases exactly how he envisioned. Today, this clients staff is able to enter a search inquiry from z.Find and get the results from both ERPs in one place. Never having to go into the old ERP was a giant step forward for this client.

This innovation was enabled because the z.Find was developed with tools for users such as the ability to index multiple databases and to design customizable search results. From there, the client used his imagination to improve his business….and potentially yours.