Implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is one of the surest ways to improve the information flow across the organization. ERP integrates all the functional departments in an organization and ensures availability of relevant information on time.
The most important thing is getting the right application implemented. Once you understand the pain areas in the business environment, you need to look for the suitable application to address all the pain areas in the market. That is what called as ERP evaluation process. The main aim is to get an application which can address your pain areas effectively and allow the company to scale up. There are some important steps you need to follow in the evaluating process of enterprise resource planning applications.
At the outset, start researching about the best ERP applications and vendors available in the market. You can start the research over internet first. Start exploring for the applications available in the market and know where all they have implemented initially. Look at the applications which are running on environments that are very much similar to your business environment. This type of research can give you a clear picture on the type of applications you need to choose.
Don't just go by brand names of the ERP applications. Branded applications may be good in terms of features and flexibility but you need to know whether it will fit into your environment or not. Based on this initial research, call some vendors for initial discussions. Make them thoroughly understand your business process, pain areas, future plans and other related information. Try to probe the vendor as much as possible to get more information on the ERP. If you start evaluating at least four to five vendors, you can easily figure out the pros and cons of all enterprise resource planning applications.
Select the best applications among them and ask them to visit your business live environment so that they would be in a position to suggest the best solution. The evaluation process has to go on till you see the original application running on your live environment for some days. This process is called as Proof of Concept (POC). You can to scrutinize the application thoroughly in the process of POC. This process clearly tells that whether the application is able to address your pain areas or it needs to be customized to fit into the requirements.
Based on all this study, the vendor will prepare a document about the current business environment and keeps a benchmark for the potential business growth. This process is popularly known as GAP analysis. Read GAP analysis document completely and make certain that everything mentioned in the GAP analysis document makes sense. Know to what extent the application is going to be customized and remember, the more customization can kill the original features of the enterprise resource planning application. It is your responsibility to emphasize on this issue also. Customizing an ERP is good if it does not affect the original features of the application. If all these things go perfect, you can proceed further for negotiations and sign on the deal.
