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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Step away from the decision–let’s look at the meta-selection. The SageCircle blog features some recent posts on selecting analyst services. So here we are, TEC, guiding all sorts of people in their selection processes for software, recommending best practices, developing custom research, etc., and the interesting thing (if I read the SageCircle blog correctly) is that our recommended software selection best practices can be applied for clients seeking analyst services, of the sort we offer, hence a meta-selection.

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It’s a bit surprising that sales teams from some ERP vendors are still under the impression that simply wining and dining a customer is enough to win a sale. It’s this type of hubris that can cost vendors entire projects.

Recently, I was helping with a customer’s software evaluation and selection process. Yes, we have products and solutions that extend beyond the simple self-service tool usage we offer on our website. For this project, TEC was brought onboard to help conduct a comprehensive evaluation and selection process, following our methodology.

This means we looked at vendor RFI data in our software and augmented it with their unique requirements to get to a shortlist. With the shortlist, we looked at the vendors’ market information (for which we have a template), and then added other evaluation components including vendor scripted demos, performance and scale, ease of use, and reference checks. Conceptually we have to take the easily quantified elements, and supplement it with measurable qualitative factors. Some of this work was done on-site, some of it was done remotely, but at the expense of making this discussion too verbose, I’ll focus on our services related to evaluating their finalists.

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