Situation
Our client was a company that manufactures industrial refrigeration equipment. The company had successfully grown over the past 10 years to the point where they are one of the top 2 independent equipment manufacturers. The company had an old outdated accounting software package and no other business software tools for any of their other business processes.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 and the USA.
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 Shortlist using a proprietary ranking methodology
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 4boys required 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 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 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 10 solutions currently advertised for the custom manufacturing industry
- A custom RFP package
- A summary of 8 solutions that claimed to have complete ESS solutions
- A short list of 4 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.