"It Does the Job" Isn't Good Enough Anymore: UX, Performance & Security in Your ERP

Part 1: UX — An Unadopted Tool Is a Wasted Investment

According to Gartner, 55 to 75% of ERP projects fail to meet their objectives — not because of technical failures, but because of poor user adoption. In plain terms: teams don't use the software because it's too complex, too slow, or too unintuitive.

The cost of a poorly adopted ERP is brutal: you pay a monthly license fee for a tool your salespeople avoid, your accountants work around with parallel Excel files, and your field teams never open on mobile.

The 4 Most Common UX Issues in Legacy ERPs

• Excessive navigation: finding an invoice requires 6 to 8 clicks through nested menus. Every daily action becomes a mini-ordeal.
• Non-responsive interfaces: designed for 1920×1080 screens circa 2008, these interfaces are unusable on a phone or tablet. Yet 43% of field salespeople need mobile access.
• Hermetic terminology: legacy ERPs use accounting and technical jargon that is opaque to business users. Result: data entry errors and refusal to engage.
• Lack of visual feedback: the user submits a form and doesn't know if the action succeeded. Errors appear as a wall of illegible red text.

What VIA ERP does: our interface was rebuilt from scratch with a "users first" approach. Every common action is accessible in 2 clicks or fewer. The interface is fully responsive (desktop, tablet, mobile). Error messages are clear, contextual, and paired with a correction suggestion.

Part 2: Performance — Every Second of Load Time Costs You Money

An Amazon study showed that one extra second of latency reduces conversions by 7%. While this applies to e-commerce, the same logic holds for internal productivity: an ERP that takes 5 seconds to load every list, multiplied by 50 users performing 30 actions per day, represents over 2 hours of lost productivity daily.

ERPs hosted on-premise or on aging servers have a structural problem: they were not designed for today's data volumes. A client with 50,000 annual transactions and a product catalogue of 5,000 items will see load times explode within a few years.

The 3 Primary Causes of Slowness in ERPs

• Monolithic architecture: all code runs on a single server. One heavy task (report generation, data import) blocks every other user.
• Unoptimised SQL queries: software built 15 years ago with queries that scan entire tables instead of using indexes. Every list takes 3–8 seconds to load.
• No CDN or caching: every static file (PDF, image, attachment) is reloaded from the server at each access. No intelligent caching.

What VIA ERP does: cloud-native architecture on AWS with automatic load balancing. Average list load time under 400ms. Scalable infrastructure — performance does not degrade with volume. 99.9% uptime SLA with 24/7 monitoring.

Part 3: Security — 83% of SMBs Suffer a Data Breach Within 5 Years

This figure, from a 2024 Verizon report, is alarming — but not surprising. SMBs are prime targets for cyberattacks precisely because they are perceived as less well protected than large enterprises. And often, that's true.

If your ERP stores customer data (names, emails, bank details, VAT numbers), commercial data (contracts, margins, negotiated prices), and HR data (salaries, contracts), you have a legal obligation to protect it properly — or face GDPR penalties of up to 4% of global annual revenue.

The 5 Most Common Security Gaps in Unmaintained ERPs

• Absent or weak encryption: data stored in plain text in the database. A database leak directly exposes all customer data.
• Outdated protocols: unencrypted HTTP connections, TLS 1.0 or 1.1 (retired by modern browsers), expired SSL certificates.
• Poor password management: no rotation policy, unchanged default passwords, no two-factor authentication (2FA).
• No audit logging: impossible to know who accessed which data, when, and from which IP. GDPR audits become impossible.
• Unpatched security updates: on-premise software vendors publish monthly security patches. Many SMBs never apply them, leaving known vulnerabilities exposed for years.

What VIA ERP does: AES-256 encryption for data at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit. Mandatory 2FA for administrator roles. Full audit log with export for GDPR audits. ISO 27001-certified infrastructure. Security updates applied automatically without client intervention. Daily encrypted backups across 3 distinct geographic zones.

What Your ERP Should Guarantee in 2025

The bar has been raised. A modern ERP is not just a management tool — it is critical infrastructure for your business. As such, it must guarantee:

• An interface your teams actually want to use (not just tolerate)
• Stable, predictable performance — even at high volume
• A security level appropriate to legal obligations and current threats
• A contractually guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA)

If your current ERP doesn't tick these boxes, it no longer "does the job" — regardless of its feature list.