Canadian
airline WestJet firmly believes that applying gamification i.e. game designs
notion at workplace would help its employees to efficiently utilize Oracle ERP
(enterprise resource planning) system.
Until
now, ga,ification was extensively used for sales, employee performance
management software and support and not for core ERP systems. WestJet, in
co-ordination with Badgeville- enterprise, gamification vendor and Oracle,
initiated the pilot project that would focus on expense reporting.
Since
expense reporting provides large amount of users to test gamification, it is an
ideal method, said Mike Mihaichuk, manager of ERP and finance applications.
Gamification
is “a look at human behavior and what motivates people,” he said. “Different
people are motivated by different things in different situations.”
Gamification
“has been around for a long time,” Mihaichuk said. Working with Badgeville,
WestJet created “a lot of badges that were just for fun,” as it is important
for badges to be easily attainable, he said.
“People
were interested to see this use of technology because it’s something they use
today all the time” on sites such as FourSquare, he said. “People are so used
to this these days.”
“This
is a methodology to improve influence and influence outcomes,” said analyst Ray
Wang, founder and chairman of Constellation Research. “In ERP, what do you want
to influence? For a manufacturing line, it may be the defect and quality
process. You would apply an incentive to identify defects and also one to
internally crowdsource solutions with rewards. You can apply gamification to
everything.”
Gamification
is fairly a new concept; however, it is garnering importance in different
technological verticals. A new research suggests that key factors that are
driving growth of global gamification market are customer& employee
engagement, user experience enrichment, etc.
