Andrea Jones walks through the final step of choosing an ERP system: comparing your top two or three vendors on core features, pricing, implementation timeline, support quality, and whether they fit your company's culture. She covers what to look for in customization needs, licensing costs, help desk responsiveness, and vendor kickoff timing.
Hi, I'm Andrea Jones. Today we're going to talk about our fifth and final step in an erp, or system selection process, and that is to make an informed decision. Okay, so by now you have mapped out all your requirements. You understand what's critical and what would be nice to have. You've only looked at solutions in terms of the software that meet your critical needs as much as possible. You have considered all of the different vendors who could provide either the one solution or multiple solutions. You have done all of the demos and you have really thought about the nuances of partnering, and you're down to the final two or three, probably not four, but maybe top three, let's say. How are you going to make this final decision? Again, this is a system and a partner with whom you will be working for possibly decades to come, and a big deal. So what we do at this point is we gather all of the information and we use both our logical and our emotional brains to make the decision. So the information we need to compare apples to apples here is what is the functionality of the system? How well does it meet your required criteria as well as your nice to haves? Right, like, can you get everything you absolutely need out of the box? Do you need any customizations? If so, how much are those going to be? Right, so what is the ability of the system to meet your expectations, your functional needs? And then of course, what is the pricing? And there's two kinds of pricing we have to talk about here. There's the estimate for implementation on the vendor side. They're going to tell you it's going to be X to Y number of hours, and that's going to cost, you know, X to what number of dollars? And there's going to be the ongoing fees for your licensing, for your maintenance costs or anything like that. Okay, then we have to think about the timeline in which you will be able to implement the system. A lot of times vendors will say, oh, six to nine months, and it often will take a little longer than that. If you don't have a point person on your project being the manager and pushing the schedule, often it will take longer than that, but we'll talk about that in implementation. However, there's one more piece of the timeline to consider. Right now we're working with the customer who signed for their system at the end of March, and the vendor has not been able to formally kick off yet. And it is currently the almost end of July. So we didn't actually help with that selection. They brought us in to implement and we have been pushing, pushing, pushing. The vendor had some things that have been value add and since we didn't help with selection, we had to do some mapping anyway. So the time has been used well and it will help with the implementation. However, we don't want you to have to wait that long. I mean, that's kind of ridiculous, right? Like a whole quarter before you can even get started. You need to understand that. Okay, and after all of that, what does the ongoing support look like? So you can compare that. Are you going to have a help desk? Is it tickets? Do you have an assigned representative? Do they meet with you every quarter? You know, how do those things look? Okay. And then all of those other nuances, all the things that you feel you need to be a values fit with this partner that you're going to have for decades to come. And when you compare those things, apples to apples at the steering level, steering committee level, that's the executive team making this decision. They're well informed, they can make the decision readily. There may be a little bit of discussion, however, it should not take too long and we hope you have chosen the best system for you. And if you work with us, we really be happy to help guide you on the process. Okay, one last thing will be the final overview summary and we'll talk a bit about negotiating your contract, maybe even as a side video too. Thanks so much for watching.
