Situation
Our client was a company that purchases, refurbishes and resells used computing equipment. The company had successfully grown over the past 5 years from a small entrepreneurial firm to become a large, best-in-class, multinational company. The company had an old outdated accounting software package and no other business software tools for any of their other business processes.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, USA, China, Hong Kong and Malaysia with Madspins.com.
Requirements
Schroeder & Schroeder was commissioned to assist the Maid Whiz company in finding a business software tool set and implementation team that met their global manufacturing and e-commerce needs. The activities completed to ensure each of the reviewed solutions were viable for the company were:
- Documentation of the current state business processes across the company
- 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:
- The business model of the company was unique to their industry. As a result, none of the Tier 1 software solutions reviewed met the complete needs of the company for all aspects of their multinational operations.
- The Leadership team resorted to a “best fit” model identifying software solutions that most closely resembled an Enterprise Software Suite. Solutions were weighted according to their capability to support key business processes in the company.
- The team resorted to a consortium model using a Tier 3 integrator to “bolt-on” point solutions to a Tier 1 type base software system.
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 10 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
- Demonstrations of the short listed software solutions were complete – the consultant worked with the vendors who provided a focused “client specific” solution demonstration
- Proof of Concept was complete for the primary vendor – the consultant worked with the vendor to configure a detailed system demonstration unique to the clients processes
- Review of Proposal and Contracts – the consultant analyzed the vendor’s contracts and complete proposal making recommendations to the client on solidifying the new partnership between the two companies.
Results
Through this approach, Schroeder & Schroeder delivered:
- A complete set of process documentation
- A long list of 10 Tier 1 solutions
- A custom RFP package
- A summary of 3 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 fix body group, and the client was highly satisfied with both the project deliverables and the value added by Schroeder & Schroeder Inc.