8 Steps to help ease your ERP software selection process:
STEP 4: NARROW THE FIELD
So you’ve decided to purchase a new ERP system. There are thousands of products on the market, and narrowing down the contenders can be an arduous process. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you narrow down the field.
The Golden QuickBooks® Rule
“If QuickBooks meets your needs, there is no need to look further.”
However, if you are on this site you are probably too large of an organization to be using QuickBooks.
How Robust Do You Need?
You need to make a decision about how robust of a system you need. There are some very large companies using comparatively simplistic packages; conversely there are some comparatively small companies on very robust packages.
The newer ERP packages are designed to be used by everybody within the organization and, in many cases, by everybody the organization does business with. They have fully integrated CRM, employee portals, customer portals, and vendor portals. A couple systems even have fully integrated ecommerce systems for both retail and wholesale sales. At least one ERP package we are familiar with even has plans to interface to Microsoft Skype for Business (an enterprise capable phone and collaboration system) and that package isn’t even a Microsoft package. The older packages may not have all of these features built into the core system, but may have third-party add-ons to achieve some of the functionality.
You may also need an industry specific package. For example, if you manage HUD properties or need medical billing capabilities, the list of packages that will meet your needs narrows quickly. Find out if there are any packages for your line of work if you are in a specialized industry.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, if you are a Fortune 100 company, you should probably be considering SAP and Oracle. However, you should definitely also consider others!
Local Is Not Always Better
There is a common misconception that you need to have a local presence (local dealer) in order to get good support. In ERP Selector’s opinion, this is completely false. There are pros and cons to purchasing through a dealer versus direct, but there is certainly not a clear advantage.
It used to be common for dealers to represent several ERP packages. This is becoming less common and even if you find one, be very careful to look for bias. They undoubtedly earn different commissions on different packages. They are also undoubtedly more familiar with some packages than others. Be leery and carefully evaluate their opinions.
Reviews
You should also ignore almost every ERP package review that you read. All of them we have seen are written with a bias or hidden agenda. Many of the reviews are paid for by the ERP developer themselves. Reviews that compare packages are particularly useless. There is no one person or organization that is familiar enough with all of the packages available to provide an unbiased comparative review.
The only valiant effort we have seen in someone trying to do this in modern history was Dr. Roberta Barra (now with the University of Hawaii) who wrote an article for the Journal Of Accountancy. But the editor(s) at the Journal of Accountancy “improved” the article by inserting their bias into the article before it got published.
Do yourself a favor and look at some of the packages other than the most well known ones. In many cases they have far more functionality and better support than the well-known packages. We constantly update the ERP Vendors section of this website in order to help you with your search!