10 Critical Mistakes in Selecting an Order Management System
Recently, I had a call from a multichannel company about why their order management system selection process had failed. In their case, they signed the order management system 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 in selecting order management systems:
- Not having the right team in place to select and implement the order management system;
- Failure to write requirements and develop a gap analysis between vendor order management systems;
- 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 order management system’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.
If you’re interested in discussing your order management system project, contact Jeff Barry at jbarry@fcbco.com, or call (804) 740-8743. F. Curtis Barry & Co. is a national consulting firm that works with eCommerce, catalog, retail, manufacturing and wholesale distributors on projects focusing on supply chain strategies, order management systems, warehouse management systems, inventory management, third party logistics, and to reduce freight costs.
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