Making COTS Work for Your Business Transformation Goals
The benefits of COTS
In the land of legacy ERPs and CRMs, COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) software is a godsend – doubly so if you’re looking for efficient digital transformation of business processes. And that’s because, commercially produced, COTS software comes close to ready to use with far less user intervention and training lift.
Those of us battered, bruised, and bloodied by the interminable implementation cycles involved in deploying ERPs and CRMs have readily jumped at this prospect of getting up and running quickly.
Not just faster, either, but also with less associated expense than ramping up with ERPs and CRMs, as well.
Of course, COTS doesn’t mean no implementation effort at all. Far from it. There will be work to do to get the system to its final usable form for the business, starting with coming to an agreement on what business processes to use within the COTS system (More on this later).
From there, teams will also have to define security models as well as what they want different sets of users to do within different parts of the system. It’s not even unheard of to have training overhead associated with teaching users which parts of the COTS system they should ignore.?
All that withstanding, COTS solutions still tend to retail at a lower price point, with customer support included – what’s not to love for an increasingly cost-conscious C-suite?
Understanding the limitations of a COTS-only approach to business transformation
There’s a whole lot, with cost being one of the great differentiators between COTS and bigger, bulkier incumbents.
However, senior leaders looking to transform business processes through digital software investments can’t afford to look at retail price alone. We have to look at the big picture.
And what does that picture look like?
Well, that picture looks murkier when companies find themselves (often inadvertently) taking a COTS-only approach to business transformation.
How’s that?
Limited flexibility.
The biggest issue with taking a COTS-only approach, shorn of any customisation, is that it’s invariably one size fits all.
Having stopped at what’s available out of the box, purchasers have only bought themselves a mass-market product, which is by definition cookie cutter.
A lot of business benefit can come out of that product, no doubt. But enterprises who turned to a purely COTS-approach to business transformation because they found ERPs and CRMs too inflexible will oftentimes find themselves with many of the same issues.
Overreliance on developers.
One such issue being COTS-only customers remain heavily reliant on developers to design their workflows.
This happens far too often. Simple workflow changes take far too long to make.
Developers of popular COTS products get bogged down. In consequence, their customers get consigned to the back of the queue, waiting for a simple workflow change to improve the same business process they were seeking to transform in the first place.?
Pay less today. Pay more tomorrow.
How about deferring necessary updates and customisations?
Well, for one, more enterprising users won’t wait. They’ll come up with effortful workarounds to make their lives easier, sacrificing corporate security, privacy, and availability in the process.
What’s more, when system users get bogged down addressing present challenges, they’re not innovating for the future, the whole point of business transformation.
Nor does deferring updates and customisations mean that need goes away. It just means customers are kicking the can down the road, only to have to eventually pay the opportunity cost of deferred innovation.
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Consider COTS with low-code designers
How then to maximise your COTS investment, without hemming yourself into the box of taking a no customisation approach to business transformation? That’s where COTS with low-code designers come in.
These are COTS platforms that come equipped with built-in fully configurable workflow engines, with no-code, visual designers for defining and managing automated processes within the platform.
Visual designers incorporate drag-and-drop tools to facilitate customer ease of use. And the resultant workflows then automate, guide users through, and/or enforce business processes, by designing a series of tasks or actions with a logical flow, decision points, and outcomes.
These workflows can dynamically present different screens, forms, or views to users, with different assignments and action buttons, based on the stages of the business process or life cycle of information. This helps to guide users through a given process or capture information in a “wizard” style.
Further interface capabilities allow users to understand where and what stage a process is at, what the next step is, and who is assigned to the action.
The full functionality includes:
Three easy steps to business transformation with COTS plus low-code designers
Where off-the-shelf best practice (COTS) meets low-code customisation is the sweet spot for businesses seeking transformation through digital software. But to make the most out of the investment, though, senior leaders, business owners, IT and procurement managers have some work to do.
What’s the extent of that work?
Business process stakeholders must first build out and understand their business processes.
This might sound like a no-brainer; however, you wouldn’t imagine the number of prospects seeking out COTS solutions with only the vaguest understanding of the business process or problem they mean to digitise and transform in the first place.
This manifests itself in high-level requirements documents, suggesting that clients have only a vague understanding of the solution they need.
Now, if customers took the time to gather detailed (not overwhelming) requirements based on a thorough understanding of their business processes (and problems), they would be in a much stronger position to complete the second step to achieving business transformation with COTS plus low-code designers. And that step is substantively engaging with the platform and its designer capabilities.
Indeed, understanding the platform’s full capabilities, not just its impressive out-of-the-box features, is key to achieving digital transformation.
For instance, a platform might come equipped with workflows from best-practice libraries to get you up and running quickly. This, no doubt, is a huge benefit, particularly to businesses with less mature processes and programs.
Nevertheless, it’s only by substantively engaging with vendors that you can unleash a platform’s full visual workflow designer capability, making the purchased platform work for you via workflows that support the automation of business tasks as you’ve defined them.
Who does the engagement, though? This takes us to the final, often missing, step to achieving business transformation. Customers need to invest in the requisite resources needed to support a COTS-plus project.
What resources, specifically?
Subject matter expertise, in my experience, is crucial to developing the kind of detailed requirements needed in a transparent tender. Barring internal resources, an external SME should be built into the project’s total costs, to facilitate the requirements-gathering process, helping internal users add more precision to the capabilities they want a COTS platform to be able to do.
From there, the contracted SME can hand things off to an experienced project manager who can work with the development team to see if those requirements make sense, need further refinement, or aren’t feasible.
Is the expense worth it? From the companies who’ve gotten the most out of their COTS-plus low-code designer project, it’s an expense that’s paid off tenfold.
And so, finally, as I’ve sought to argue, decision makers keen to achieve business transformation in the face of widespread disruption shouldn’t get boxed into taking the COTS-only approach.
Instead, they should seek out COTS plus low-code designer capabilities, investing in the resources needed to see that project through to a close, with the keys to project success being a (1) thorough understanding of internal business processes, (2) engagement with the platform and its designer tools, and (3) adequate resourcing of business transformation experts.
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