1. Define Business Requirements. Here’s where we start: We define and prioritize your key business requirements, which serve as the basis for evaluating the potential software vendors for your solution.
    
2. Evaluate Long/Short List of Potential ERP Vendors. Our team begins with a “long-list” of potential vendors and conducts a high-level, qualitative assessment of the potential vendors, based on your defined business requirements. Typically, we will eliminate software solutions that do not address a majority of your critical, high-priority business requirements and arrive at a “short-list” of vendors that can meet your needs.
    
3. Assess Software Functionality. Once the short-list has been defined, we facilitate vendor demonstrations and user evaluations for each of the products’ functionality. We create demo scripts based on your key user requirements to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison of each package’s functionality.
    
4. Assess Software Technology. In addition to assessing general functionality, we also evaluate the technical strengths and weaknesses. Areas of focus include ease of integration with legacy systems, ability to customize, scalability, and general technical architecture. As the conclusion of Steps 3 and 4, our team develops a comprehensive vendor scorecard, which compares each of the short-listed vendors in key functional and technical areas.
    
5. Identify Hardware Requirements. In order to ensure you have an appropriate hardware infrastructure to support a new ERP system, the Klee team also assesses your existing hardware environment and identifies upgrades and costs required to enable ERP.
    
6. Facilitate Vendor Selection. Once all of the data has been collected, we work with your team to analyze and summarize the research conducted to date. We also make recommendations at this point and facilitate the decision-making process to ensure your key client stakeholders agree on the go-forward decision.
    
7. Develop Implementation Strategy. Once the vendor has been selected, Klee works with your team and the chosen ERP vendor to develop the most effective implementation strategy. We represent your interests to ensure that key variables are considered when developing the strategy, such as resource availability, cost, risk, integration, and user resistance to change.
    
8. Develop Business Case. In order to help justify the costs associated with a new ERP solution, we will document the costs associated with the project, including software, implementation, internal resource costs, and other “hidden” costs that companies often overlook. In addition, the Klee team will define the projected benefits of ERP, including specific and actionable performance measures that can be tracked moving forward. These costs and benefits are summarized in a business case that outlines cash flow, return on investment, payback period, and other financial metrics to help you make an informed decision.
    
9. Conduct Organizational Change Management. Throughout the duration of the vendor selection process, the Klee team assesses the organizational readiness of implementing ERP, identifies potential resistance to change, and develops a communications and training plan to enable a successful ERP implementation from your end-user perspective.

At the conclusion of our vendor evaluation and selection engagements, our clients have a clear vision of how to best move forward with their ERP initiative to increase effectiveness and minimize project risk. We’d love show you, too, how implementing a cost-effective ERP isn’t as elusive as you think!

Please note: Due to our current  SAP and JD Edwards practices, all ERP Selection projects are performed by an outside firm that has no business relationship with any ERP vendor. The work is performed by Eric Kimberling, an ex-Price Waterhouse consultant, and his group of consultants—all with a background of many years of successful ERP vendor selection projects.

To request more information or be contacted by our ERP Evaluation team, please fill out this form. Capitalize on the experience provided by Klee Associates!