Situation
Our client was a company that manufactures bakery products for retailers. The company had successfully grown over the past 20 years from a small entrepreneurial bakery to a large supplier to Tier 1 food retailers. The company had an old outdated accounting software package and no other business software tools for any of their other business processes. The company is a majority owned Canadian company with manufacturing facilities in Canada.
Requirements
Schroeder & Schroeder was commissioned to assist the company in developing a short list of Enterprise Software System (ESS) solutions. The activities completed to ensure each short listed solution was viable for the company were:
- Documentation of the current state business processes across the company (high level only)
- Creation of a customer requirements list
- Generation of a complete Request for Proposal (RFP) Package
- Identification of a long list of Software and Implementer pairs for review
- Management of the complete RFP process
- Review of Supplier submissions and analysis of complete data set
- Selection of Solution Short list using a proprietary ranking methodology
- Selection of a prime vendor for system implementation
- Review of pricing and legal documents between the two parties
Challenges
The main challenges faced on this project included:
- Recent IT advancements were only now being adopted in the ESS market. The analysis team needed to do a deep dive on each solution to ensure current best practices were being used in the software system.
- A complete ESS implementation required not only a best in class software package, but also an implementation team that is experienced in the client’s business sector. Finding this complete solution set was uncommon in the client’s industry and hence challenging.
- Recent improvements in IT hardware and the commodity nature of software development had set new expectations for software use in contract bakery operations. Ensuring that complete ESS capabilities were available in each solution was critical to the project.
Actions
After analyzing the project requirements our consultants addressed the challenges presented and performed the following actions to deliver results to the client:
- Conducted a Business Process Review – the consultant created a high level business process summary for all processes by interviewing all team members in the company.
- Generated RFP Requirements and Documents – the consultant took a step beyond standard software RFP practices and ensured all current state requirements were addressed in the RFP package.
- Communications with Vendors – the consultant communicated directly with each of the 20 different vendors on the long list to ensure they understood the improved requirements in the RFP
- Analysed data, Created summary and short list – the consultant addressed the submission shortfalls directly with the vendors, analysed the responses and recommended a final short list
Results
Through this approach, Schroeder & Schroeder delivered:
- A complete set of process documentation
- A long list of 10 solutions currently advertised for the bakery industry
- A custom RFP package
- A summary of 4 solutions that claimed to have complete ESS solutions
- A short list of 2 solutions that were the only solutions to be within 90% of the client requirements
- Selection of one candidate for negotiations
Upon conclusion of the project, all key success factors had been achieved looking for vacation rental cleaning service bay area, and the client was highly satisfied with both the project deliverables and the value added by Schroeder & Schroeder Inc.