Midmarket Companies Should Clarify Requirements for Process and Information Support to Avoid ERP System Selection Errors

January 2008 from Gartner Research and available from Epicor - Key Findings of this research include:

• "Midmarket companies are not small and simple. They have some specific and individual strategic processes
• Because of the limitation in IT resources, mid market companies are willing to accept “good enough” functional for their nonstrategic processes"

Gartner recommends that midmarket companies consider the scale of operation and strategic importance in the selection process and not to select systems that are overkill.

180 View – We agree that midmarket companies need to prioritize their requirements but have trouble with using scale and strategic as criteria. Although a midmarket company may not have many transactions related to some processes (IE low scale), the automation of these processes could provide huge benefits. Same goes for strategic – a process may not be strategic, but improving its business process may also provide huge benefits. We think taking a business case approach is the way to prioritize. A critical requirement is one which will allow a company to be significantly more effective (allow the company to achieve its Critical Success Factors – those things it must do well in order to be successful) or significantly more efficient (do more with less resources). As well, we think the same advice goes for large/enterprise organizations to prioritize based on business case.