First impressions of Fendahl’s Fusion User Interface
The Fendahl team recently presented me with an overview of their Fusion CTRM solution.
Fendahl claims their software is intuitive and easy to use. While most software vendors make that claim, my initial impressions of the Fusion CTRM UI were very positive in this regard. I could tell Fendahl has continuously applied a focus on the end user in their design and development of their product.
The Fusion user interface presents the user with a lot of data and makes extensive use of the available screen real estate. There is often a debate with user interface design as to how little or how much data should be presented to the user on one screen. While the screens might look “busy” to the untrained observer, given the complex nature of CTRM software and the amount of data behind each transaction, I believe the individual user roles will understand and appreciate the approach Fendahl has taken with the Fusion UI.
While there is a lot of data potentially available, the UI provides easy and intuitive configuration options for users to tailor the data they need to work with. As the Fendahl team presented a quick tour of their solution, I saw a very consistent look and feel across the entire application. I observed an intentional and deliberate attention to detail in the UI design. I understood the importance of this from the user’s perspective while I was thinking as a trader, a risk manager, a scheduler and an accountant. It appeared to be easy to get the summary view (big picture) and then utilizing onscreen configuration to build upon that in order to bring in more depth as required.
Fendahl has incorporated some advanced capabilities into some of their key screens which enables their users to easily solve many of their basic reporting requirements. This ranges from flexible filtering capability, data grouping/aggregation options to pivot grid reporting on some of their key screens. This is an important UI design aspect allowing users to remain on their primary transaction screen and avoid constantly jumping to other screens to view the results of reports.
In addition, the Fusion UI offers easy to use dashboarding capability within the system. This allows end users the ability to configure graphs and data tables to illustrate key summary metrics and simplified management reporting. This dashboarding capability is relatively basic in comparison to dedicated external 3rd party BI tools, but its strength is in its simplicity and the fact it is part of the core system user interface, and in the hands of the end users.
“Breadth and depth” is an overused term to describe software solutions, however my quick tour of Fusion gave me good sense of Fendahl’s history. I could quickly understand some the system fundamentals that are appliable to all commodities. I also saw several examples of how the product can layer on additional functionality specific to individual commodities and business processes. I look forward to further exploring Fusions’ capabilities with the Fendahl team in the future.
Keep in touch and sign up to our Newsletter
