Today, our industry is inundated with a plethora of ERP checklists. There are two problems with checklists: lack of completeness and definition. At Ultra we do not believe in checklists to determine an ERP requirements definition. We feel they add little value in evaluating ERP systems.
How to Determine Your ERP Requirements Definition
An enterprise software selection project is all about business process transformation with modern ERP technology. Therefore, the ERP requirements definition should focus on defining the future state of business processes and evaluating the ERP solution against that future state business process model. The future state business process model then becomes the requirements definition.
The ERP requirements definition becomes a script of business processes of sorts. The function requirements are listed within the process script.
The vendor demonstration focuses on future state business processes. Think of the ERP demonstration as a “day-in-the-life” process presentation.
The demonstration starts with defining a product and then progresses through the following processes:
- Sales process
- Planning process
- Production process
- Shipment process
- Accounting process
- Engineering process
- Quality process
- Warehouse process
- Human resources process
The ERP selection team grades each vendor on how well their system addresses the processes defined in the script. The presentation requires the ERP vendors to use the client data.
An important part of the evaluation is ease-of-use and access to information for each vendor. Treat these areas as general topics that should be understood at the front end of each presentation.
