Bringing all product stakeholders in a tighter loop within the entire product life cycle is one of the main strategies of the product lifecycle management (PLM) methodology. Following this idea, letting the customers (those who pay for and/or use the product) get involved as early as possible in the product design and development phases provides many benefits, including: more ideas for innovation, less design rework, higher customer satisfaction, shorter time-to-market, and more.

Today, including customer inputs in the design process is not only a theory, but also an increasing requirement from PLM users. Based on statistics from the TEC PLM Evaluation Center, among 50 possible business objectives for implementing a PLM system, the option of “including customer input in the design process” changed its ranking from 28^th (in the year 2007) to 20^th (in the year 2008) (see figure 1). Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever wondered why every time you hear a story about an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation failure, the vendor gets the blame? The customers did everything they could to avoid it, but the vendors either provided inappropriate training and support, or simply a poor quality product.

Frankly, I do not think that an ERP implementation failure can possibly happen without at least some contribution from the customer. As a customer, no matter what the vendor does to influence you during the selection process, the final decision is yours and you have to make sure you make the right one.

Here’s a list of things a customer should consider before selecting an ERP—both during the implementation and even long after. I have selected 13, because ERP selection and implementation has nothing to do with luck.

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