Are IFS Lobbies driving you loopy? Are you suffering from Lobby Lag?
From IFS Apps 9 and onwards, Lobbies have been included as a core function of the system. Lobbies can visually show data in the form of lists, charts, counters, traffic lights and help your users to understand key metrics and important items that require their attention.
Some examples of what you can use IFS Lobbies for include
1. to give a visual indication to your users on what tasks they need to complete
2. to give a visual indication to your users on the status and progress of your processes
3. to give a visual indication to your users on your financial performance
but there are so many more use cases.
The Lobby is also interactive and can be designed so that your users can click onto the Lobby Element and get to the underlying business objects being referenced in the data. This navigation is powerful and provides some quick access to your data, so that your staff can get down to the actionable items. Without this, your user would need to think about what screen they need to access, what queries they need to perform on that screen and how best to filter and interpret that returned data.
The combination of data and navigation works perfectly….as long as your consultant keeps the scope small and focused - Chris Wharton, IFS Consultant
What we often hear are complaints from clients about Lobbies taking a long time to load and refresh. The user experience is bad, the lost time is huge, and it reduces the productivity of your workforce. It is not always as easy as it should be to display the data and drill down to your action items.
Lobbies are meant to be kept small and specific to reduce load times and to display relevant information quickly to the user. Even small delays can affect the perception of your Lobby and your IFS implementation to your users. This article by the Neilson Norman Group is a great read to understand more about time scales in user experience. After 1 second, users notice speed issues, once you go past the 10 second mark, your users switch off and begin to think about other tasks.
And most of the time, this is not the fault of the IFS Applications software. It is yours…. or at least the consultant who designed the Lobby with your requirements - Chris Wharton, IFS Consultant
From my experience, a lot of the frustrations and speed issues come from the fact that sometimes, too much data is showing on screen. The Lobby is doing several complex queries, taking data from multiple modules within IFS. Each of the elements will take some time to query and return your data. If you have an element with a complicated query, the processing time and delay to your users increases. If the Lobby is used by many staff members simultaneously, the central database will be attempting multiple instances of your complex query – which lengthens your processing time for everyone – not just the users on your lobbies.
So…what can we do to speed things up and improve user experience?
The key principle is that as the number of users increases, the complexity should decrease.
By following this principle, we can say
Lobbies for many users should have low complexity
Lobbies for fewer users can have a higher degree of complexity.
To improve the user experience, create multiple Lobbies in a structure with each level becoming more specific and task oriented. The Lobbies at the top of the structure should be the quickest to load and have a lower complexity as these will be the starting points for many of your users and will be queried more often. As you navigate down through the Lobbies, you can begin to introduce more complex queries, as the number of users requiring that data should be decreasing, and the queries are not being executed by all users unnecessarily.
So, instead of the type of Lobby in the picture above, which is pulling data from multiple IFS modules, and could have a significant lag and keeps your users waiting around, try to think about this instead. Have a few key elements for your user and some navigation elements to jump down to more specific and task orientated Lobbies, like in the picture below.
The sub-Lobby can then have complex elements and more data to show to the user. This way the data is only queried when users specifically ask for that information through navigating to that Lobby screen. In this example the finance and procurement users would not need this data and would be unlikely to click through to this Lobby, however the production coordinator would need this data and may be the only person to use it. It therefore makes little sense to put this data in the master Lobby.
The interconnecting Lobby structure will lessen the load on the system and increases performance and speed of the user interactions and decision making. If designed correctly, the data that loads on the screen will be tailored to the information your user is looking for they have chosen a specific path, and we can show them specific information. We may still have a data element that needs to have a complex calculation, but it is being performed only when the user specifically loads that screen.
Another small tip. If you have customised your tables with multiple custom fields, make sure they are properly indexed, ideally use a persistent field – as each read only field will also need to be calculated if that data is used in the Lobby.
It is important to remember that Lobbies are not always the best solution for your requirements. If you need data to be pulled from multiple areas of the system and you have complex calculations and queries, then a quick report or standard report could be developed and delivered to your users. This will all depend on your intended audience for the data (management vs operators) and the expectation on what to do with that data (decision making vs analyse and action).
When they are well designed, Lobbies are a fantastic way to navigate through IFS Applications, especially when considering IFS Apps 10, Aurena or IFS Cloud interfaces and using tablets and phones as the input device.
Techris Consulting has worked with several clients in improving their Lobby designs to achieve a better and faster user experience. We re-created a Lobby for a client that was taking 100s of users over 2 minutes to load and reduced this to a matter of seconds – saving a hefty amount of un-productive waiting time.
If you would like to look at removing the lag from your Lobbies, get in touch.