What about your customers? Is your finance team pulling their hair out at month end? Do other business units have multiple systems and offline spreadsheets to manage in order to pull reports or perform processes? Canvas team members from around the business to identify internal pain-points and to learn which supplier and customer requirements you could be meeting more effectively. Use our ERP requirements template to identify and prioritize your needs for new software.
ERP might have started life as a manufacturing and financial operations tool, but your sales team, marketing team, and HR teams can also provide valuable insight.
This is also the time to get the requirements in priority order and, once again, look back to check business strategy alignment for each one. Having documented your requirements, you are well on your way to getting an RFP underway.
The vendors will also need a breakdown of your current software, hardware and internal implementation and maintenance support you have in-house.
Vendors also need to know your implementation timescale expectations , the reasons for the requirements you have outlined what problems you expect to solve and a reasonable deadline by which they need to respond. Producing a document with a solid introduction to your business needs, operations, pain-points and ERP ambitions will help put your requirements into context. Using an ERP RFP template to create uniform proposal documents helps you meaningful side-by-side comparisons during evaluation.
Some vendors may have out-of-the-box solutions that make a great fit for a requirement while others may need to engineer a customization or deliver a bolt-on at extra cost. This template will help you quickly identify which vendors have the best solutions ready within the required schedule while also giving the vendors your own requirements, contacts, and timelines.
Establish the specific duties to be performed by the provider and the expected outcomes. Include a detailed listing of responsibilities, particularly when subcontractors are involved. Include a detailed project timeline from RFP send-out to go-live and a breakdown of your project budget. This is where you will provide a detailed list of ERP functional requirements and technical specs broken down by business unit, with space for vendors to explain how their system can meet each of them.
You should also ask whether the solutions will be out of the box or customized. Find out if the vendor has worked for similar clients with similar needs and ask for references. You can also check for accreditations and awards or other signifiers of a good fit for your ERP requirements. This is also a good opportunity to check how stable the vendor is and if they will make a good mid to long-term partner.
Having a process in place for proposal evaluation is essential in ensuring that you select an ERP that meets your key requirements. You may want to consider scoring each vendor against their ability to meet each of the requirements you outlined in your RFP, perhaps on a scale of one to five. It's also not uncommon for organizations to completely miss certain costs elements to their ERP project.
By starting your ERP project by estimating the costs, you can ensure that you build contingency into your ERP project plan, that you can choose the most cost effective path forwards and convince your executive board that your project plan is fully considered.
ERP projects can vary dramatically in costs across multiple different elements, including internal costs, ERP software costs, hosting, support, implementation and delivery and much more. You will need to justify the ERP cost by choosing the right pricing model for your business as well as being meticulous about exactly which features and modules you need and what you expect your ERP to deliver in financial value.
Not all modules will benefit all businesses, so make your decision carefully. There are two readily accepted pricing models for ERP purchase, each with their own set of pros and cons. There are also hybrid options which borrow parts from each model, but in order to grasp what will work best for your organization, you need to understand the main differences between these two.
This model allows a business to host the software on their own servers on-premise. It can be a wise choice for large businesses but more difficult to manage for smaller businesses without the infrastructure already being in place to support it. The initial outlay for sufficient hardware can make this model challenging for small businesses but for those with existing hardware capacity, it can actually be a cost-saver.
Here are the main pros and cons:. The SaaS model is increasingly popular with smaller businesses with their eyes on growth and flexibility. Given that this model incorporates cloud-based hosting, a small business need not invest in a hefty infrastructure overhaul or large upfront license fee. Of course, it is not the best fit for every business so here is a quick snapshot of the SaaS pros and cons:. One of the biggest pitfalls in any tech investment is the potential to be oversold.
There are many features that sound exciting but you will never use, whereas some may be needed later. To calculate the right ERP budget and invest wisely, choose only the features that you need.
Must-haves will usually include accounting, financial management tools and inventory management, but not all will need a B2C commerce interface or CRM module, for example. This list of 70 features to look for in your ERP will help you find the right features for your business.
For example, you might not need multi-currency or multilingual capabilities in your financial module right now, but if you are soon to be launching in new markets, it could be cheaper to include these features from the outset rather than having to retrofit later.
Installing the software itself will vary from provider to provider and from enterprise to enterprise, especially if you are going with an on-premise model but do not yet have sufficient infrastructure to support it.
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