We live in a time of exponentially increasing distractions. We are constantly bombarded by information whether it be social, news or simply advertising. We carry devices with us wherever we go to make sure we don’t miss any of this. While this constant “connectedness” may seem like the ultimate step in the quest to stay informed, perhaps it does exactly the opposite?
In the past we consumed the news in a daily or weekly newspaper (and before this monthly), now it is thrust onto us instantly from platforms such as Twitter. We are notified immediately before time can distill an event or give it context. Did we really need to hear about the “latest crisis in Sysprobekistan”? Will the adaptability of the human brain find a way to cope with information overload or will we continue to be simply overwhelmed by all of it?
Perhaps there is a third alternative – where the technology available can condense the plethora of information for us. We have the tools required from big data to machine learning and of course the cloud, surely with our input, we can add smart filters so we’re only notified about events that really matter, rather than a smorgasbord of meaningless notifications. Something that gives us daily or weekly headlines rather than every minor event.
Using AI to Improve the Relevance of Data
This is such a broad and all-encompassing topic but what does it mean to businesses and, in particular, SYSPRO customers? ERP systems, in general, are certainly not devoid of these numerous notifications and constant updates, some of which are essential to know while others are meaningless or indeed will prove to be.
Our approach to alleviating this from the innovation department at SYSPRO is to allow for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) within the SYSPRO rules engine to smartly select when an event really has meaning and then use our new set of active notifications to inform the user.
Combining Features for Maximum Value
The SYSPRO rules engine was released with limited fanfare along with our social platform, SYSPRO Harmony, to provide hooks into when things happen inside SYSPRO and also set up rules about when these matter and what should be done about them. In the innovation team, our goal for 2019 is to flesh out the existing products we’ve released and start bringing them together to really harness their power. We are tackling this by providing support in our Rules Engine for Machine Learning and Active Notifications to our web-based interface Avanti, Bots, and SYSPRO Espresso mobile, and allowing these rules to be easily set up and configurable from inside Avanti.
An example of how this is practically applicable would be if a notification was automatically pushed to a buyer on creation or amendment of a purchase order, warning of a potential delay in delivery. This notification arises from a prediction based on a machine learning model.
All of these features are available in isolation, but during 2019, we in SYSPRO, hope to not only make scenarios like this possible, but also easy to set up with UI tools accessible from inside our web-based interface, Avanti. Once this is released, I’ll follow up this post with a step-by-step guide on how to achieve the above scenario. In this way, perhaps we can do our bit in alleviating this avalanche of information at least from the perspective of our business systems.
