Situation
Our client was a company that provides contract manufacturing service to customers that require custom machined or fabricated metal parts. The company has successfully completed a several year financial turn around and is ready for significant growth. The company had an old outdated accounting software package and a similarly outdated Shop Floor Data Collection system. The company is a 100% Canadian owned and operated with over 30 years of success serving the manufacturing industry.
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
Challenges
The main challenges faced on this project included:
- Recent IT advancements are 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 used in the software system
- A complete ESS implementation requires not only a best in class software package but also an implementation team that is an expert in the client’s business. Finding this complete solution set is uncommon in the client’s industry
- Recent improvements in IT hardware and the commodity nature of software development have set new expectations for software use in custom manufacturing industries. 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 20 solutions currently advertised for the custom manufacturing industry
- A custom RFP package
- A list of 12 solutions that did not reply to the RFP as they could not meet the updated standards for the complete client requirements
- A summary of 8 solutions that claimed to have complete ESS solutions
- A short list of 3 solutions that were the only solutions to be within 90% of the client requirements
Upon conclusion of the project, all key success factors had been achieved, and the client was highly satisfied with both the project deliverables and the value added by Schroeder & Schroeder Inc.