In a previous blog post, based on TEC’s outsourcing selection criteria, I summarized 6 types of experiences that a buyer should consider when choosing the best provider for application software outsourcing projects. Since then, my interest has been raised to the level of taking a further look into outsourcing buyers’ requirements for their potential providers’ expertise in a real selection process. Thanks to TEC’s Outsourcing Evaluation Center, users are able to identify their high-level requirements, run outsourcing service comparisons, and receive a short list of qualified providers. I was also able to look at the statistics of these high-level requirements and found out something that might be interesting for both outsourcing buyers and providers. Read the rest of this entry »

Product lifecycle management (PLM) originated decades ago in the discrete manufacturing area, and for quite a long period of time remained mainly as a solution for the upscale market in industries such as aerospace and automotive. However, recently PLM has become more approachable for smaller-sized businesses in more industries. It is not difficult to have this impression when you see increasing versions of PLM solutions targeting small and medium business (SMB) and mushrooming solutions such as PLM for consumer packaged goods (CPG), PLM for fashion, PLM for retail, and so on.

On the user side, based on statistics from TEC’s PLM Evaluation Center, it seems that users are willing to take the same direction – compared with 2007, more smaller-sized business users are considering PLM in 2008. At the same time, more potential users are from industries that traditional PLM doesn’t fit well.

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When there is an outsourcing failure in the application software area, “poor partner performance” is a reason that frequently appears in the post-mortem report. But, who is responsible for choosing the outsourcing provider? Instead of blaming the lousy job that you’ve received, it is more helpful to investigate how you have ended up with this incapable partner if you don’t want to fall into the same trap again.

You can never be too careful when choosing outsourcing partners and you should look through all the aspects or features of your candidates that will affect your selection decisions. Some of the aspects (e.g., business size, level of certifications, and employee educational level) are quite explicit, but aspects such as development methodology, skills, and experiences are harder to measure during the selection process. One good approach to examining those inexplicit aspects is to break them into finer granularity and make them more measurable.

In this blog post, we’ll look at one single but very important aspect—experience. And to give you a better grip on matching partners’ experiences with your business needs, we’ve broken experience down into six main types. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been to the TEC Vendor Showcase recently, you’ve probably seen this symbol.

If you wondered what it means, you might have clicked it, and read this:

“TEC Certified Vendors have met the stringent requirements set forth by our analysts. Associate vendors have taken the first step toward their TEC certification by completing our extensive request for information (RFI).”

Concise, yes. But maybe a little light on detail. So here, to shed some light on the nature of RFIs, stringent requirements, and “associate vendors,” is a short explanation of what TEC certification is all about.

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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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TEC launches its own corporate blog

Always on the lookout for new and improved ways in which to reach and connect with our varied audiences, TEC is proud to finally launch the Corporate Blog Project.

We decided to launch with WordPress MU, giving us all the renowned capability of the WordPress engine and the flexibility and option of housing a network of blogs under the umbrella of TEC. So now, aside from our main TEC Blog, we also present in parallel our Spanish language blog Foro Empresarial.

We have a myriad of ways in which we keep contact with our users, and now, additionally, we wish to provide our users - be they end user or vendor - with the ability to “talk back”, to create a tighter community, and to engage in friendly and stimulating discussions.

We hope that this environment will serve as a rewarding and beneficial one to all. Blogs away!