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When
it comes to purchasing a software package, the best way to decide if a
particular package matches your business is to use it for 6 months.
Unfortunately, you don't have the time to keep trying packages and re-sellers are not in the habit of letting you evaluate their software and then return it after 6 months. Purchasing business software is all about minimising the risk of choosing a package that may not fit the business. The good news in our experience, is the vast majority of business software (especially finance systems) work and are capable of doing a job. Which system best matches your business is what needs to be determined. Best, because it would be extremely rare for a packaged system to exactly match your business processes, only a bespoke solution can do that. If you need a system like this, then a bespoke programmed system is your answer and mooooch has extensive development expertise should you require to go down this route (see Bespoke Programming area). For the majority of organisations a package solution will suffice and mooooch can advise on which packages would best fit with your business and minimise the upheaval that is inevitably caused when implementing them. The items below show some of our guidelines we use to identify a software solution for your business. |
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Don't rush evaluating a software package by seeing a few demonstrations
and then making a subjective decision. This software is likely to
be with you for the next 5 to 10 years, make sure it matches your
business and give it the best chance for maximising its value
Every re-seller of software will proclaim the virtues
and support services of their package over that of its competitors.
Trying to compare software pacakges is very difficult and it's hard
to see the wood from the trees when confronted by all the sales speak
and demonstrations.
Before a re-seller is contacted you should compose a list of what a system must definitely do (not doing it will reject the package). Then devise a method of putting a quantitive value on each system based on what is important for the package to achieve. For example, the time to enter a purchase order; assign 5 points if it can be entered in 30 seconds, 3 points for 60 seconds and 1 point for for 2 minutes (assumes the longer it takes reflects the complexity of the system when inputting the data). If it can export your ledgers into Excel (5 points say), can e-mail statements (3 points), etc. The scoring requisites must match what your business processes are trying to do, ie if you only process 30 purchase orders a month, measuring purchase order input times will not be relevant, however if you are processing 500 a month it probably is. By talking with your employees on what is important and not important for a software package to best fit your business, we can develop a methodology to put a quantitive interpretation that relates to your business needs for each software solution we look at. The aim of this process is to identify 2, at the very most 3, packages to focus on in a detailed evaluation, knowing that each would produce a good fit to your business if it were chosen. Once you have decided on a software package, we can give assistance
during the implementation, covering such aspects as data take on,
training and coordinating with the re-sellers project manager. (See
the Software Implementation
area for further details).
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| mooooch has a proven methodology when it comes to evaluating software packages | |||||||||
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