R3Now.com – ERP, SAP, and IT Solutions for IT Decision Makers

Sales, Software Selection Scams, and Performing Your Own Software Selection

Recently I went on a sales call to propose for helping a fairly large retailer do a software selection and then a vendor selection.  Because of my many years of experience with SAP one of the initial concerns they raised was whether or not I could be objective and unbiased.  That is not only a fair question but a critically important question.   I decided to approach this sales presentation effort in a very different manner by providing solid, verifiable, and objective methods to evaluate sof...

Designing startup metrics to drive successful behavior

Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. And great management teams know that the only way to improve a process is to start by measuring it. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In this post I hope to help show how to figure out which metrics matter the most, and how to design them in such a way as to drive behavior that will lead to the results that you want. This post is applicable to any kind of business. In a follow up post, I wi...

ERP Consultants: Is the Promise of Knowledge Transfer just part of the Sales Pitch?

Most ERP projects are filled with promises of software knowledge transfer from the consultants to the client. Yet once a project is over, in many cases, the client is clueless when it comes to making software configuration changes, and may even struggle with performing basic transactions in the system. So what gives? In spite of all the lip service given to knowledge transfer, the problem is there never was a real strategy to make it more than just a dream. Secondly, when push comes to shove ...