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Software Selection

Instead of product sellers, our team is led by professional consultants with years of real-life experience helping business owners and managers eliminate inefficiencies and improve their business processes. We have extensive experience with all the leading systems and conduct ongoing research on emerging solutions.

Business Case Foundation

Software selection starts with an understanding of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) which we define as those things an organization must do well in order to be successful. We facilitate a management/executive meeting where the CSFs are identified as well as the key requirements and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). There are many ways to achieve CSFs but our focus is through systems. So we ask what system functionality would help achieve the CSFs, which in turn become the critical requirements for a new system. We also ask how the CSFs are measured (KPIs) and the current metric and the KPI goals for the new system. We think that it's time to celebrate not when you go live or even if you're on time and on budget. The time to celebrate is when you reach the KPI goals.

Business Process Review

The next phase in our process is understanding the existing business process. We document the business process steps, problems, the impact of the problems and the requirements. Sometimes we also provide swimlane flowcharts. We focus on the problems as a new system is the best opportunity an organization will ever have to fix problems. In fact every problem should be considered an opportunity. The impact allows us to know what's important and can also be useful in a business case. The requirements are based on the strengths of the existing system and the functionality that could potentially fix the problems. The swimlane flowcharts provide a simple and effective way to visualize the business process flow.

Requirements Analysis

We create a requirements document that contains the key and unique requirements. We strive to be clear, unambiguous and don't waste time with basic functionality. We also supplement the needs you've already identified with our own comprehensive industry-specific checklists. We have each requirement confirmed and prioritized. The requirements are wrapped into a Request for Proposal, which is issued to potential vendors. We prepare a preliminary analysis of the vendors which includes costs, scoring of their responses, underlying technology, developer and implementer information. We facilitate high level presentations followed by reference checks followed by a Proof of Concept, which is a demonstration based on a day-in-the-life script that we prepare. We also assist in contract negotiations to ensure favourable terms and the best price.

Click here for more about our system selection methodology.

For more information, call Michael Burns at 416-485-2200 or contact us.

 

 
1enterprise resource planning | 2business intelligence | 3professional services automation
4customer relationship management | 5supply chain management | 6business process improvement | 7corporate performance management
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