Best practice in selection and implementation of ERP Systems Software

National Forum On Technology Solutions

February 21, 2018 | 0 Comments | 180systems

180 Systems and CPA Canada developed a new conference that was targeted to senior leaders responsible for technology investment decisions. The conference focused on enterprise software (ERP, BI and CPM) and included customers speaking about their journey through selection and implementation by industry (manufacturing and distribution, not-for-profit and financial services). It also included solutions for today’s industry challenges and emerging technologies such as AI, Blockchain, and IOT. The conference took place on May 28-29, 2018 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and we will do it again next year. Click here for more information about this conference […]

Is Your Implementation On Track?

February 1, 2018 | 0 Comments | 180systems

February 2018 from CPA Magazine and written by Michael Burns – “Senior executives of any organization that is going through a major system implementation worry whether the implementation project will cause huge problems when it goes live or whether the costs and time estimates are accurate. The project manager might be telling them all is well but project managers have been wrong on occasion. How do you look under the covers of a project to see what is really happening?”… Read more […]

What come first – an ERP system (the chicken) or lean management (the egg)?

November 16, 2017 | 0 Comments | 180systems

Lean management is all about eliminating any waste by identifying each step in a business process and then revising or cutting out non-value added steps. The question is whether this should be done prior to selecting an ERP system. Proponents of doing it first assume that the implementation of an ERP system would be merely improving the automation of the existing process and better to eliminate the waste first. However, this approach (sometimes called repaving the cow paths and extending the chicken and egg analogy) is not best practice. The implementation of an ERP system is the best opportunity to […]

2017 ERP Survey

September 28, 2017 | 0 Comments | 180systems

September 2017 from CPA Magazine – “Welcome once again to our annual vendor survey on enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Every year we have a different theme for the article that accompanies our ERP survey results. This year we decided to look at the fine print in ERP contracts and the good, the bad and the ugly about requests for proposals (RFP) used in software selection….” Read More […]

How Do You Compare A SaaS Annual Fee To A One-Time License Fee?-180Systems

March 29, 2017 | 2 Comments | 180systems

We have found that on average the one-time (on-premise) license fee is 3 times the annual fee based on our experience in evaluating RFP responses from vendors. One might think that the ratio between license and annual fee should be greater but that does not take into account the additional hosted services provided by the SaaS vendors including maintenance fees which are billed annually by on-premise vendors at approximately 20% of the license fee. It’s still early days for SaaS and as competition heats up the license ratio: annual fee will increase as SaaS fees are reduced. We recommend that […]

180 System ERP Customer Survey

January 11, 2017 | 0 Comments | 180systems

From CPA Magazine and written by Michael Burns – “We have all heard horror stories about failed ERP implementations but we rarely hear about the ones that went well. Does ERP deserve the bad rap it gets?…” Read More […]

Reduce Risk of ERP Implementation Failure: Pre-Contract Business Needs Analysis

June 8, 2016 | 0 Comments | 180systems

You naturally want to minimize risks and avoid cost overruns before signing a long-term contract for a new ERP system. Your prospective vendor also wants to minimize risk, but is usually not in a position to do anything other than give an implementation estimate based on lots of assumptions about scope, roles and responsibilities. These assumptions could be fairly accurate, but could also be way off, which could lead to surprises and costly change orders during the implementation. Neither you nor the vendor want this to happen. Wrong assumptions that lead to change orders will create frustration, friction and could […]

Statement of Work (SOW) Stoppers

January 27, 2016 | 0 Comments | 180systems

The SOW is a key document from your vendor that can make or break the implementation. The vendors will do their best to reduce their risk by limiting scope to a high level list, assuming that you will follow best practices, and making a lot of other assumptions about you doing work that you don’t know or understand the effort to complete. As the vendor risks go down, the customer risks go up. We recommend the following: Scope is tied to the requirements in the RFP which need to be specific Best practices should only be applied to processes that […]

So the project has gone belly-up, what now?

December 15, 2015 | 0 Comments | 180systems

December 3, 2015 from LinkedIn – “Most SMEs and many larger companies are not experienced in running projects. It is just not something they need to do on a regular basis and certainly not with this much at stake. An investment in the services of a skilled internal Project Manager is rarely a waste of money. It will often cost you more to skimp in this area and then have to recover afterwards…” Read more 180 View – The author, a business development manager for Pronto Software, makes a number of really good comments on why implementation projects fail and […]

Demonstration Scripts

December 10, 2015 | 0 Comments | 180systems

A demonstration script is critical to the selection process but there are huge differences on how to do this. Rather than criticize the techniques we have read, I will share our methodology with you: Two demonstrations – You don’t want to go too deep on the first demonstration unless you are positive that the vendor will not waste your time (or their time) 1st demonstration – We base it on a small subset of the most important requirements in the RFP and limit the time to about 3 hours. We allocate a certain amount of time to each requirement and then […]