7 Tips to Evaluate an ERP Demo

You’ve spent lots of time doing the background work in your ERP evaluation — setting aims, defining necessities and finding potential solutions. Now you’re in the home stretch — it’s time to see your top contenders in motion! If you’ve been following together with our guide to evaluating ERP solutions, you’ll already understand the advantage of using a structured approach throughout this process. You’ll need to apply that same concept to your ERP demos to make sure you get what you need out of each one. The excellent news is that you’ve already done most of the preparation work, it’s only a matter of getting everyone on the same page before you dive in.

1. Gather the best people for the demo

As powerful as it may be to schedule a bunch of individuals, you’ll need the same people attending every demo. This will present consistency to your analysis process and enable you to stick to your timelines. At a minimum, every member of your ERP project team should clear their calendar to attend the ERP demos. It’s their responsibility to make certain the demos tackle your necessities. To make sure your executive sponsors can see and ask questions about the system, make sure they are on your list of attendees. And, depending on the scale and structure of your group, you may want to embrace key customers from specific departments for the related components of the demo. Just ensure the size of your group stays manageable — it’s simple to get off track when there’s too many individuals around the table.

2. Prioritize your enterprise requirements

If you haven’t already recognized your critical success factors, now’s the time to achieve this. This is your rating of important requirements for the project to be thought-about successful — it’s tied immediately to your ERP project objectives. Without your prioritized list, it’s difficult to evaluate how nicely every ERP solution can meet your requirements. So, if you haven’t set your targets or prioritized your requirements yet — stop and do that before scheduling any demos.

Having a transparent picture of your current challenges and needs will assist steer the conversation with ERP implementation partners. But you’ll be able to count on every associate to have their very own process that may enable you to wonderful tune your requirements. This is one of the first signs of a powerful ERP partner — they use a confirmed approach to perceive your needs and advocate one of the best solution.

3. Use a solution evaluation scale

To get probably the most value out the demos, you want the flexibility to capture each quantitative and qualitative suggestions from your team. A rating scale just like the one under permits you to consider every practical point in a methodical means so that everybody in your group is utilizing a standardized strategy.

0 = Not available

1 = Major workaround / custom development

2 = Third-party solution

3 = Minor workaround

4 = Available in current year

5 = Included in present release and price estimate

This helps you evaluate the features and performance. From a qualitative perspective, you’ll need to capture people’s suggestions on ease of use, process fit and system flexibility. You can create a simple scorecard and distribute it to your group earlier than the demo so they can fill within the blanks. Using the same scorecard for every demo will make it simpler to analyze the results and evaluate solutions.

4. Prepare your staff

Before you start Odoo ERP demos, provide your group with a bundle that features your challenge targets, your prioritized record of enterprise necessities and your demo scorecard. They ought to reference again to these paperwork for every demo to guarantee the knowledge is contemporary of their minds. Before every demo, share fundamental background data on the implementation associate and vendor that you’ll be evaluating. This will give them a really feel for who the partner is and provide context going into the?Odoo demo.

Designate someone on your project team to share the information, accumulate suggestions from every demo and facilitate the follow-up discussions internally. In most circumstances this might be your project champion, however you possibly can assign another member of your group if you happen to prefer. And reinforce together with your team that good note taking is important — your demos could happen over a number of weeks, so that you need to have good notes to refer to.

5. Communicate expectations with the ERP partners

A successful demo is essentially depending on having clear understanding between you and the?ERP partner?doing the demo (or vendor if you’re working immediately with them). Be clear on what your necessities and targets are. In our enterprise, we have a sign-off point after our discovery stage to ensure we absolutely perceive the requirements. If the associate hasn’t built this into their process, ensure you communicate the data again and have them indicate their understanding. This will create the idea for the demo script, so it’s important to agree. If you’ve any perceived performance gaps, communicate them earlier than the demo. The associate should provide clarification through the demo to alleviate any considerations.

6. Focus in your ERP targets

Remember that record of ERP targets we talked about earlier? Keep that useful through the demos. You ought to stroll away from each with an understanding of the way you’ll obtain your targets. An excellent associate will create a script that not only demonstrates how their ERP system meets your high necessities, but most significantly, illustrates the way it solves your largest challenges. Two issues to watch for in your demos that may make the nice partners stand out:

1. They should be using demo data that’s related to your enterprise. This helps paint the image of how the system will work for you and your processes.
2. They ought to go beyond simply addressing your necessities and illustrate how the gaps in your present processes shall be filled, how present processes might be improved and how new capabilities will impact your enterprise.

7. Analyze both the partner and the solution

The results you see out of your ERP answer might be considerably depending on the implementation associate you select.?The right ERP partner?might be mutually invested in your success. To the factors above, they gained’t simply present you the options you need to see and name it a day within the demo. They’ll present you the impression and exhibit their understanding of your enterprise. It’s a good sign of how long-term they’ll be. Encourage your group to present suggestions on the associate each within the demo and all through the analysis. Think concerning the culture match between your organization and theirs. Relationship is important and shouldn’t be overlooked, especially when you’re signing on for a long-term partnership.

Final ideas for a successful ERP demo

• Limit your demos to two or three providers. If you’ve any more than that, you’ll muddy the waters and have a tough time distinguishing between solutions.
• Leave time on the finish of every demo for extra questions. If a query comes out of your discussion that was not coated in your preliminary necessities list, don’t be afraid to ask for a follow-up session.
• If potential, do your demos on-site. If your staff is spread out geographically, a digital demo could be required. Sitting in a room together can have a significant impact The in-person interaction goes a long way to establishing the connection and facilitates discussion in a means you could’t always replicate on a video call.

As one of the top?Odoo ERP partners, we have helped many other global companies streamline operations and fuel growth. We’re right here to guide you through the method — right from analysis, via implementation and beyond.