Business owners have been trying to take initiatives to automate the business process in any industry. ERP implementation is one of those initiatives where in they can streamline all the functional departments across the organization.
The best vendor in the industry will give you the best service. So, the vendor evaluation is the most critical part in the entire process. You need to take utmost care choosing the vendor because it is a matter of a paradigm shift in your business operations.
This article will provide you some basic tips you need to follow in the vendor evaluation to get the best vendor in the industry.
1. Do a very good research over internet first to know what exactly the ERP is and how it works. In this you are going to equip yourself with the sufficient information on the Enterprise Resource Planning. This will help you in probing the vendor and get pros and cons of the application.
2. Research on the vendors available in the market. Speak to your friends or colleges and ask them to check with their friends regarding the best vendor in the industry.
3. Keep all the opinions and take the common names and call them for the personal discussion.
4. This is the discussion where you need to probe the vendor and short list handful of vendors for the next discussion.
5. This is where the actual process begins. Call each vendor and ask them to visit your production environment and come up with the solution.
6. Some applications may not fit into your industry if your business process is so complicated.
7. Ask them to arrange a demo if they come up with the solution. In this phase, you need to probe the vendor as much as possible to get into the depth of the application. Mostly, you will coma to know the features of the ERP allocation in this phase.
8. Call the vendor with whose application you are comfortable with and ask them to give a proof of the concept (POC). POC is nothing but running the same application with the real time data in your own environment for some days. You can easily comprehend the entire ERP application in this phase.
9. If possible ask them to take you somewhere, where you can see the application is running in similar environment. Check with those guys regarding the application and ask them to give a candid review.
10. If you are comfortable with the Enterprise Resource Planning application, you can just go ahead and ask for the quote. The nest would be the negotiations and the order closure.
11. The second important step will start now is the ERP Implementation.
12. Anyhow, the vendor will show you the detailed document where in the requirement mappings, the solution details and implementation process will be mentioned.
13. Go through the document thoroughly and suggest for any changes in the document because they will start implementation based on these document only.
These are the basic steps you need to follow before zero in on any Enterprise Resource Planning application. Follow these steps and get the right ERP application implemented.
