10 Critical Mistakes in Selecting Order Management and Warehouse Management Systems
This past week, I had a call from a multichannel company about why their order management system selection process had failed. In their case, they signed the vendor agreements prematurely only to find out that the bid was incomplete. There weren’t any estimates for modifications, interfaces, conversion and training. As a result they had been pushed by the vendor to “get into the implementation queue and work out the details later”. Now that the implementation is planned their costs will be 50% higher than originally thought!
Here are the 10 major mistakes that we see companies make:
• Not having the right team in place to select and implement the system;
• Failure to write requirements and develop a gap analysis between vendor applications;
• Limiting the search to a few vendors too early in the process;
• Not conducting a competitive bid process;
• Picking technology over application function;
• Planning too many modifications versus adopting the application’s business process;
• Superficial demos that aren’t scripted to critical functionality;
• Incomplete reference checks;
• Signing vendor contracts before the total investment for hardware, software, services and maintenance are identified;
• Not having an intellectual property lawyer review the agreements before signing.
After 23 years of helping clients select and implement order management and warehouse management systems, we have put together a seminar to help shut down these potential problems. The seminar - “Selecting the Right Order Management and Warehouse Management System For Your Business” will be held in Richmond, VA on May 5 and 6, 2008. The seminar will be conducted by Paul Sobota and Brian Barry – two guys who have selected and implemented more order management systems than any other consultants.
Call Jeff Barry at 804-740-8743 or email him at jbarry@fcbco.com for details.