The Definitive Guide for Choosing Business Management Software - CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

SUMMARY:

No one said it would be easy to choose an ERP. But this chapter presents a light of hope to those professionals who have to select software that will condition the operation and, by extension, the growth of the company. If choosing a management software is a headache, this guide is aspirin that will help you face it. Reading this first page you will know immediately if this guide is addressed to you or someone from your organization.

KEY IDEAS:

• During the process of selecting a management tool mistakes are made. This guide points them out and helps minimize them.
• The main problem is that the seller always knows the tool better than the buyer.
• This guide does not sell any product, it only helps to select it with guarantees. Of course, we recommend that you incorporate solutions based on open source software into the range of possibilities.

IF YOU ARE READING THESE WORDS, it’s likely that you’re thinking about installing a new software program for your company. Or you might even have taken this step in the past, and the experience was so unpleasant that you now want to try to understand where you went wrong. Whatever the case, please keep reading. We decided to write this guide after seeing just how concerned managers and IT professionals were when they came to ask us for advice. The vast majority of them had suffered bad experiences in the past or were worried about problems in the future, and as we like to share what we know, we decided to go over the main mistakes people make when selecting management software, and our recommendations for minimising such mistakes.

And that’s what this is: The Definitive Guide for choosing your Business Management Software, which is something like a recipe book that will help you to create a dish you have never seen before, or reduce the most important risks involved, while giving you room to focus and work on your own initiative. Because when it comes down to it, you’ll see right away that the main problem is that there is never anyone in the company who really has the experience or training to take a decision like this one. Ignorance about the product and the technology involved leave us at the mercy of salesmen and their persuasive talents, and people often make a decision based on their intuition and not on the real facts available.

And before we begin, just one last thing; don’t expect us to tell you which type of software you need. That’s not down to us. We’ll explain how to deal with the process, what you have to look at and what questions you’ll need to ask the sales people, we’ll point out the common pitfalls you might find along the way and even how to avoid them. But we’ve not written this guide to sell you a product. We want to help you deal with the selection process, with information on hand, and without the anxiety and stress of not knowing whether what you’re buying is really what you need, and if it comes at the right price.

However, we do want to tell you that we love open source – i.e. software made in a cooperative manner that can by modified and distributed freely, without restrictions of any sort. It forms part of our way of understanding the world in which we live and work. This is why we also want to use these pages to explain just what these free technologies can offer companies. We want you to see them as another option in the wide range of management solutions available on the market. With this information you’ll be free to make an informed decision on what best serves your interests.

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