8 Gamification Features Ready to Boost ERP Efficiency

The worst day fishing is better than the best day working. This is one cliché often used to describe work. Gamification is a tool that can be added to ERP and other systems to fight that cliché. It can help make work more fun and motivate your employees, so how does ERP gamification fit into your company?

Points & Rewards

Games require some scorekeeping. No one plays football for 90 minutes, shakes hands and agrees it was a fun game. ERP Gamification also needs scorekeeping and often this is achieved by awarding quantitative value performance. Really, this is natural progression from the company-wide analytics functionality that you already use.

Team Incentives

Team members can score points by completing their assignments on time. The whole team can score when everyone completes assigned steps. The goal is to keep a team moving along their timeline toward their objective.

Performance Review

ERP Gamification allows employees to score “points”. Points earned can be a factor in employee performance reviews. They would earn points for meeting objectives and developing their skills, for example.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a massive feature of ERP gamification functionality. The introduction of gamified targets into your ERP processes has the potential to do wonders for employee motivation which, in turn, will boost the ROI you see on your ERP purchase.

Workflow Improvement

Points can be awarded to users based on speed and accuracy of data input and collection. This leads to increased productivity for the whole business. Productivity leads to profits.

Game Theory - Games like cards and board games have winners and losers. Scientists have studied how we make choices in playing games and learned how to apply that understanding of choices to work activities. We all make choices in work that can be as simple as what job to start next or as complex as how best to win a profitable new customer. Few of these choices are as simple as a card game where one wins and another loses. The best results are when all parties win.

Competitive Gamification

We are all competitive to some extent. No one wants to be outdone by our colleague in the next cube. Few of us would ever try to be in last place. Gamification allows employees to track their rank relative to other employees.

Thinking Outside of the Box

Most work improvements are incremental. We learn to do it a little bit better over time. When we want a big improvement immediately we ask ourselves to think “out of the box”. Gamification makes work more fun and keeps up better engaged in our work which can lead to more out of the box improvements.

Change Agents

Change agents are people among us who are able to direct an organization in new directions. They might work actively or passively but they can turn the ship over time. Monitor these change agents within your ERP system by implementing ERP gamification techniques such as task ROI and other metrics-based processes.

Abraham Maslow developed his hierarchy of needs more than 60 years ago. The two highest are esteem and self actualization. Gamification of our work with ERP systems helps up all reach these high levels.

author image
Tom Miller

About the author…

Tom completed implementations of Epicor, SAP, QAD, and Micro MRP. He works as a logistics and supply chain manager and he always looks for processes to improve. He lives near San Francisco Bay in California and can be found on the water in his kayak or on the road riding his motorcycle. Contact Tom at customerteam@erpfocus.com.

author image
Tom Miller

Featured white papers

Related articles