“Cognitive Dissonance”: The Problem with Asset Tracking Today
The ivy league business term used to describe a primary psychological factor behind mental paralysis is “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state that can bring people, projects, and productivity to a halt.
If a technology or solution doesn’t feel right, act right, function well, or causes feelings of unease… most workers do a full stop – as they should. This impacts user adoption, business integration, and ultimately the failure of the technology solution. We have ALL been there with a new product, solution, or app, where you get lost, frustrated, and bewildered.
The only way to avoid cognitive dissonance is to make every possible aspect of a product or solution easy to use & intuitive. This relies heavily on UX testing, flexible configuration, and making every aspect of its use easy and obvious.
Anyone who has ever implemented an asset tracking solution can tell you, most solutions are neither easy nor intuitive. Far from it. Having participated in seven different related trials, we generally found ourselves banging our heads against the desk quickly. They are generally hard to set up, hard to configure, hard to make compatible with mobile data collection, hard to manage the data, and hard to integrate it with ERP and other business back-office systems.
About
Our 8th trial, “Siteline App®” from Fulcrum Technologies was the opposite of hard. It was easy to login. It was easy to set up. It was easy to configure. It was easy to invite users. It was easy to make profiles for security and job specific functionality. It was easy for those users to join. It was easy to set up our specific organization. It was easy to load data into. It was easy to import locations and items as an Administrator. It was easy and handy to see our locations on a map view and drill in to select them for viewing. It was easy to print location barcode/QR labels for our various sites, vehicles, and warehouse shelf/bin locations. It was easy to get our test users out there stocking, transferring, and managing splits. It was easy to manage the data from any browser on our computer and phones.
Overall, it was easy to design Siteline App® to be exactly how we wanted it to be.
Fulcrum Technologies has 20 plus years getting this right, with this product built upon the foundational elements of their award winning “CATS” Asset Lifecycle Management platform – Siteline has been streamlined, taking all of the best elements, and adding a killer look and feel.
Unlike other tested solutions, Siteline is one that seems to be “sticky” right out of the gates. No cognitive dissonance here – this just felt right.
Next steps for us? We are getting licenses to keep this past our trial and make it a permanent part of our business. We are going to significantly scale our data collection to keep information flowing into Siteline. This goes beyond the Siteline mobile solution we tested to potentially include contractor input/output, audit data, orders and fulfillment information and possibly some e-Polling if we get ambitious enough. With data from all of those collection points flowing into Siteline, we truly feel that we will have the visibility to track, connect, see, report on, and share anything and everything in our business infrastructure that is of value.
To test this product for yourself, contact them at info@fulcrum.net or visit them at https://fulcrum.net/siteline-app/ today.
