ERP Software automates renewal management.
NetSuite Software Company Edition serves software companies that need to manage array of varying revenue models, including complex processes for supporting recurring revenue management streams. It brings automation and real-time visibility to management of renewals, billing, and contract management. In addition to unifying these processes, software delivers uplift and discount management as well …
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You’re looking to find out how to get an ERP Software Selection back on track. This means that you probably have an evaluation that is going poorly and you are being led by the ERP software vendors, right? The ERP Software Selection process can be a struggle, but they don’t really have to be. If the ERP Software Selection follows a clear process, then things will run smoother. The trick is to not let the software vendors drive ERP Software Selection process.
1. Get Senior Management on board now
2. Be sure you have clear goals
3. Define your both your technical requirements and business requirements
4. Have a neutral third party manage the process.
5. Eliminate vendors early, and without regrets
6. Be sure you are working with the right software providers
7. Reassess your internal team
One of the top things you can do to ensure success of any Enterprise Software Selection project is to ensure that senior management is on-board with the project and that they fully support the goals of the project. If top-line management is not supportive of the project, there will be departmental and division contentions during the implementation. Often these arise during the selection process. Usually it is the case of one department competing for the same resources as another department. This often will show up on conflicting requirements for the system. Senior management must be the tie-breaker and define the future path the system should take.
If the project does not have clear goals, it is bound to flounder. Goals should not be general such as replace our system by next January. The goals should have significant business impact. A goal like “Reducing inventory by 25% while increasing sales throughput by 15% one year after implementation” is a clear goal that benefits the business and lays a stake in the ground that the system must achieve. You may find that the system can help you exceed that goal, but if you do not measure in a clear goal such as this, how will you know you have succeeded? The pain and inconvenience of an implementation will create a lot of problems within the company, but a clear goal is a great focus agent to get past the disagreements and personality conflicts.
Often a company will define a set of requirements for a system and these requirements will have no impact on the decision of the system. Requirements need to be business driven and be tied to the factors that make your company successful. Look at the following two requirements and see which one makes it easier to help in a selection:
1. System must have serial and lot tracking.
2. System must be able to report on all shipments by a particular lot with traceability back to the original batch or incoming receiving document.
These two statements are essentially asking for the same thing, but when it comes time to solve a problem, the second requirement will distinguish of the system can solve the problem. Define your requirements around business processes, not about system features.
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Maximizing Business Performance through Software Packages: Best Practices for Justification, Selection, and Implementation |
Additionally, most systems nowadays can handle most of the key things you need. They all do General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, etc. The question is, what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses. Defining specific business process requirements around the things that you do frequently is the best way to ensure that you get a system that matches your needs.
Many times when companies get in trouble with an ERP Software Selection, it is because they tried to manage it on their own. Often the IT manager or even the Controller will get the task of defining requirements and shepherding the system selection and all the vendors, value-added-resellers, and reference clients. Since they already have a key role in the company, it often a daunting task to get them to manage the selection process and do their day job. Because of this, it is often advisable to get a third party consultant involved to manage the process. The key thing about this consultant is that they should not have any financial ties to any vendors. They need to be non-biased and have experience in many ERP Software Selection projects.
Why does this help? There are a few reasons, but the key reason is that they can supplement your time and handle all of the details around gathering requirements, building scripts, arranging demos, and being the one to have to tell the vendors “no” at the end. Further, they usually come with a broader vision of how the end result can be achieved. They also make a living out of doing these selections and they know the pitfalls and can help you avoid many of the vendor “tricks” that are often played to ensure that the salesperson wins the sale. If your selection is already off track, bringing in a consultant can often help realign the various team members and refocus the selection.
As you move into the ERP Software Selection process, it is important that you eliminate as many potential candidate software systems early on, so you are not wasting your time and efforts looking at a broad range of systems. Ideally, you start with a long list of 10 and whittle that down to the top two or three. Get the software vendors that are clearly not matching your requirements out of the running as soon as possible. Use resources to help you define the best fit for your company. Many times, the vendor will bow out if they see they are not a clear fit to your requirements. But with each elimination, document why they were eliminated, so that at the end, when someone asks, “What happened to XYZ software, I thought they were a good fit”, you will have the answer as to why they are no longer being considered.
Once you have chosen the two or three candidate software systems, you want to make sure that you are working with the right provider. Software is sold either direct or through indirect channel partners. The channel partners, or value-added-resellers (VARs) each come with their own specialties. You need to find out are you dealing with a VAR or with the Software company itself. If you are dealing with a VAR, you need to make sure that they are the best VAR to help you implement the software. Do your research early, because the last thing you want to do is to change VARs late in the process. This causes all sorts of problems, most of all it delays the selection by weeks or months.
When dealing with VARs, talk to the Software Developer (see our directory of ERP software vendors here) and get their take on the VARs strengths and weaknesses and see if there may be another company you can speak with. Interview the two implementers (VARs) and see which company is a best fit to work with your company. Often it comes down to personality, one group was too arrogant, one group just didn’t get us, or even that VAR’s sales rep had a horrible personality. Find the fit because if you select their ERP software, you will be living with these people for 6-9 months or more. You want to make sure that you can work through the implementation with them as well as later rely on them for ongoing support.
If you are dealing with the software company direct, the same questions apply, but in a sense of is this the software to get married to? You need to be sure that not only the software works for you, but also that the people and company are a good fit to work with your company.
Lastly, take a good, hard look at your team. Do you have functional members from each department? Do they each bring a wealth of experience about their area? Often the hardest thing about the ERP Software Selection process is getting the best people in your company and pulling them out of their jobs to take part in the critical task of selecting a new system. They are usually the person most in demand. They need to be the one to help select the system as they know the current system and business processes inside-out.
Often an ERP Software Selection will go badly because the best people can’t give the time to make the process happen. This is why it is so important to have senior management involved and have a clearly stated set of goals for the project. Having a third party to help move things along and to look at your business objectively will aid tremendously in making the ERP selection process easier. Most of all, by putting all seven of these tips together, you will ensure that you have a successful ERP Software Selection process and that you end up with the best software for the success of your company.
ERP Software Selection
ERP Software done correctly can be a great tool for improving a business. Done badly, it can demoralize employees and drive down business results.
Case-in-point:
“My experience with SAP was of an all-purpose integrated business solution. At the beginning of the day, I clocked in using an SAP applet. Next, I would go through a set of SAP generated planned-production orders, direct work orders, or reported directly to my supervisor. After looking through the routing information (generated through SAP), I would complete the specified task. When the task was complete, I would “clock-off” on the job, which entailed bringing the PPO to a computer, scanning it into an SAP applet, and entering my badge number (employee ID). Another thing I found interesting was the request to clock off on all activities. Even if I had only swept or scraped tape off the floors (it was a slow summer), I was asked to clock off on something called “lean labor.” I found this curious, though I suppose from an efficiency standpoint it was very important. To refer back to these “value-chains,” it is important to know exactly what every employee, piece of inventory, and work order are doing at any given time. Whether it is benig worked on, working on something, or finished, this real-time updating system allows everyone company-wide to see which projects are in progress, which are complete, and which have not been touched. Also from a managerial standpoint, it is important to see how much work each individual employee is doing and how well they are performing, not to mention that employee’s ID will always be attached to that job if future concerns arise.
Now from a business standpoint this is all well and good. But what about the employee? A lot of days, clocking and clocking out I felt as though it did not matter whether or not I was even there. There were simply no jobs to be done for entire weeks at a time, but that did not change that I had to “clock out” for certain jobs. Of course, a business wants to make sure that all of its employees are being as productive as possible, but clocking out on cleaning out the same area 3 times during a week seemed redundant and absurd. Not to mention clocking out on an activity such as “material handling” or “lean labor” is fairly arbitrary. This of course necessitated a manager to scold me when my productivity levels fell (ie playing Frisbee with a cardboard box in the back). It is important to note that I was simply summer-hired as well. Working full time at a job as a number would eventually get fairly tedious. As one of my co-workers noted to me, they had simply clocked in and clocked out for a couple of weeks and clocked off on none of the jobs they were doing. No one said anything to him. So who’s checking these jobs?” – Andrew Mellino
Implementing technology to collect data is one thing, but ERP should not be just about the numbers. ERP ideally should be “process improvement enabled by technology.” It should not be a tool to harass the employees. This is a key concept to understand when implementing and going through the design phase. Which processes are broken and which processes are working fine. Once you have defined that, then see where the ERP software can enable best business practices. It is essential that the employees have a buy in and provide feedback to this step.
If you get the employees to buy into the implementation and how it will change their jobs, you will gain the benefits of higher utilization of the system and overall better adoption. If you fail this step, you will have a failed ERP implementation. There is a saying that you should “drive data collection to the source.” This means that you should have the person who is directly responsible for the source of that data be the one who is entering it. When the ERP system is not implemented with the employees in mind, the employees will be unmotivated to use the system, ensure that the data is accurate, or even bother to put in correct information.
With the help of your line employees, design in best practices and work with them to build a system that they will use and will benefit not only them by making their jobs easier, but also benefit the whole company by driving positive results.
Many times companies try to select and implement ERP software on their own. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. So the question is, when should a company use an ERP Software Consultant to guide them in their ERP Selection or ERP Implementation?
The answer is not so simple. If a company is mature and has the resources that can look independently at the business processes, then it may make sense to embark on a selection on their own. Most of the time in mid-market sized or even smaller clients, then it is difficult for them to 1. Spare the resources and 2. Look at the business processes objectively.
Any good ERP Selection begins with a company evaluating their business processes. Borrowing from the Toyota Production system (aka Lean Manufacturing), a company should first eliminate waste and then consider automating. Automating bad processes will only make things worse faster. However, automating good processes will help grow the business and promote better communication.
The real question becomes how much is the company willing to flex their processes to adapt to “best practices” that are usually built into a commercial software system. If the company is flexible (and this takes a lot of leadership to make happen), they can select a system and model their business around that system. The larger commercial systems, such as those from Microsoft, Infor, SAP, Oracle, and others have all grown up from thousands of implementations from all sorts of companies. They have developed efficiencies that many companies who adopt the software’s methodology can benefit from.
The real key is understanding the fit of a software package to the business. If the company does some niche processing, then a mainstream commercial package may not fit. However it the company is a distributor or a manufacturer of discrete products as an example, then a standard mid-market product would likely work for them.
So how do you choose the software, it is back to the business processes and the key requirements. “Key Requirements,” not just all requirements. The things that the old system does not do well and those things that it does very well are good places to start. Additionally, discover those requirements or processes that set your company apart from others in your industry. Usually processes around your competitive advantage are part of the key requirements.
Going back to the original question, should you use independent ERP Software Consultants? If you have a clear and objective understanding, you can afford the time to really research the vendors and you have a strong will with salespeople, then going it on your own might be reasonable.
If you do not have the time, the understanding of the ERP Software market, or the will power to manage at an arm’s length the software vendor’s salespeople, then an ERP Software Consultant would be a wise choice.
1. One central database
Anything to do with the matter is held on a database accessible to all the team. View all the documents related to a matter based on a certain standard; all the documents associated with a particular contact. Incoming letters can be scanned into the matter management system..
2. Email integration
Stay on top of your inbox and ensuring that the matter information is also complete through email integration (packages support generally include Outlook, Lotus Notes etc).
3. Time saving
Reduce time spent on document management with the use of precedents and workflows. Documents are created, stored and managed in real-time. Avoid the unnecessary overheads of typing details in every time through pre-populated templates.
4. Consistency of work
Working practice consistency can be created through templates and workflows. {Appropriate automation to free professionals from background tasks – three different levels of workflow provide the opportunity for work to be heavily controlled or largely free-flowing|Fee-earning professionals don’t need to spend time on background tasks. Workflow automation is a key step to driving up team efficiencies. Do you prefer working in a controlled environment or more loose procedures. Matter managment software systems offer these choices.
5. Keep on top of key dates and events
Matter management software can be combined with your calandar system. Supporting:
6. Team effectiveness
Legal teams benefit from access to shared libraries of best practices, procedures and resources..
7. Information Management
Automated user-defined reporting. In addition to a set of standard reports. Allow user-configurable reporting to suit different organisational needs. Most matter management software allows reports to be programed to run automatically and output in the chosen format..
8. Easier client care.
Deliver an organisation-wide, shared contact database to aid collaboration and ensure that team members have access to the very latest information. Contact details can be automatically inserted as required into precedents. Conflicts and risk areas can be more easily accessed because all the files and cases associated with any contact are tagged..
9. Compliance and Records Management
Maintaining records of dates, instructions, correspondence and outcomes is increasingly important in today’s legislative environment, requiring retention or information for discovery and disclosure purposes. Implement an audit trail of the management of all records of every kind, from cases, matters and projects through to individual documents and emails.
10. Data security
Today’s professional teams are dispersed georgraphically, so an online system meaning secure access from anywhere is not only important but vital
When selecting a software, one criteria is finding out what others think of the prospective system. This can include phone calls, site surveys and other data gathering. To make this easier, ERPandmore.com has opened up a new section for ERP Software Reviews. This new section isn’t only for ERP though, it includes CRM, Business Intelligence, and even Warehouse Management software.
We are in the early days though and not all potential software systems are there. That is why we need your assistance. If you have an ERP, CRM, BI, or WMS system and would like to share that knowledge with the world, please add it to the site and add your review! This is similar to Amazon.com or any other site, where you can rate the product. So please take a look and if you can contribute to this new site, please do so. Thank you!
ERP Manufacturing Software is a specific category of ERP Software and one that can be confusing. There a multitude of ERP Manufacturing Software vendors in the market, but which one is the best one for you? The simple answer is that there may be several. There are at least four key factors that need to be examined when selecting ERP manufacturing software.
The first is the industry you are working in. Are you a process manufacturer, such as paint or chemicals? Or, are you a discrete manufacturer making specific parts? More specifically, do you make repetitive parts, or are the parts make to order? Are you a job shop environment, estimating and making parts to order? Or are you a project based manufacturer, that similar to a job shop estimates and makes parts to order, but because of a complex process or a lengthy time for manufacturing makes parts as part of an overall project? There are specific software types for each of these manufacturing industries. The key to honing in on the specific manufacturing ERP solution is to know your industry type and then examine software that serves that industry.
Which leads us to the second point, the ERP manufacturing software’s legacy. Where did this software evolve from? What industry did it originally serve and what industries were added. A software that was built around a particular industry usually has that industries best practices built into the software functionality. When the software expands to other industries, it doesn’t always fit the best practices of that secondary industry as well. And many softwares become “jack of all trades, but master of none.” Look into where the ERP software evolved from.
Once you understand the legacy of the ERP manufacturing software, you need to look at its process functionality. This means that you should have some specific case examples of your process and have the vendor demonstrate that there ERP software can handle your process flow. You do not need to do some extensive flowcharting and spend months on the design. Simply understand the flow of orders in your plant and have the system replicate that flow for you, using your data. The vendor should be able to show you this in a “scripted demonstration”. Have them prove to you that it can handle the task at hand.
Lastly, make sure that your ERP manufacturing software vendor has a good fit to your requirements. There are a lot of requirements that a manufacturing software must address, but drill down on the specific requirements that make your organization unique. Is it the way that you account for your inventory? Is it the uniqueness of the bill-of-material structures? Is it a certain process that you employee to produce parts? Give the vendor a listing of your key requirements and using the process demonstration approach have them show you that they can handle these requirements.
There are a lot of factors that you need to consider when selecting an ERP Manufacturing software system. Keep in mind that every software is unique in its approach. They say that they conform to APICS standards, but exactly how they get there is often different. Ensure that you apply enough planning and due diligence to your selection process to extract the deep and sometimes difficult answers to your questions from the ERP vendors. Most of all, keep in mind that there is a lot of smoke and mirrors around the demonstration of ERP software and you need to watch the details for the truth.
According to the Institute for Supply Management:
Spending by manufacturing companies on technology — particularly ERP and manufacturing software and integration tools — is poised to accelerate through 2007, stimulated by business issues such as globalization and the need for operational efficiency, according to three recently released reports.
This is good news. Especially for the ERP space. This month, being the year end, vendors are reporting that they are very busy. For a while, there was a drop in activity, but it seems that people are back looking at enterprise software again, especially in manufacturing.