ERP Evaluations — features/functions vs. answering questions
By: Paul Oliver
Tags: CRM, Decision, Decision Making, Erp, Evaluations

ERP Evaluations — features/functions vs. answering questions

I am working with my current employer to evaluate a new ERP solution. The current solution is end of life and an extensive RFP was developed, issued and returned. The RFP’s pages of tables listing specific features and functions covering from does CRM, have User Defined Reason Codes for Rejected Quotes to Sales Order Management Customer Specific Invoice Formats. There is also the general requirements, expectations, and system requirements and so on.

If you have read one ERP RFP, none of these wonderful detailed responses would any exciting new reading. But, they are not meant to, are they? They are meant to take the apples, oranges, and lemons of ERP solutions and make them look and smell as similar as possible for ease of evaluation. All this is part of the process that I not only have been apart of several times, but believe is necessary. Evaluating what will not just become part of a business’s life, but impact speed to market, customer satisfaction and as several failures of ERP implementations document a year or more of a business’s bottom line.

However, yes there is a however, a but, a hold on there fella. Why else write the darn blog entry?

However, when I in the past have spoken to the sponsors, champions and process owners who would request, beg or threaten me regarding the selection of an ERP vendor. Rarely would they describe what they needed from the ERP as a list of features or functions. The focus would be on questions they needed answers and the timeliness of getting those answers. In other words, business intelligence. Not just the sexy dashboards with colored charts and live updates. But the simply yes or no answers to business questions.

Did the latest marketing campaign have any other impact that we did not predict?

Is the potential of a customer’s buying power greater than what they order from us?

Or requiring some more verbiage -

How do I know what influenced a customer to contact us?

These questions are often left off the RFP and more so only come up during the final phase (if at all formally) of demonstrations. More than once I have been caught short when a question seemingly out of the blue to me gets tossed to the ERP presenter that is quickly recognized by sponsors, champions and process owners as critical to the ERP solution’s requirements.

And they are absolutely right it is critical, bless their little persnickety souls.

The questions that your current ERP solution answers are just as important as the one’s it does not answer. Documenting this is not always the easiest thing. Think of asking someone to describe the decisions they make upon waking up this morning until they walked in the door of the office. Most will get a bit testy after the start brushing my teeth from the bottom or top decision and towel on the floor or the hamper. We make tens of thousands of decisions all day long. Trying to pick the hundreds of business decisions out to determine why or more importantly how we came to the decision is both one of the most difficult parts of designing systems as well as the most important.

Unless, your business is willing to completely adapt every process to the new system plain vanilla out of the box and stay that way for 3 years (time my experience says it takes for a business to completely adapt to new habits of the new ERP). Than you need to make some effort to gather these questions. These are less about making custom changes to the software and more about matching the data collected, stored and distributed. After all, most ERP solutions have less than 40% of their licensed users who access the system to input and process data. Most use the system for inquiry and reporting. Therefore, the 60% or more require more from the data than processing features and functions. Look back to the matrix of an RFP. Are there just as many data related rows as processing related rows?

Ask the questions about the questions that your business needs answered to get the right ERP?