There is a client for every ERP solution, but how do you identify the vendor that considers your company as its ideal candidate? Different vendors target different industries, markets, and specialize in certain areas more than others. While it is good to identify vendors that work within your industry (Refer to the Industry Focus column of the TechnologyEvaluation.com Vendor Showcase), it is also important to review the products that support a similar set of functionality to your company's requirements. To this end, TEC prepares a page of graphs for each company in the vendor showcase. The graphs specify the ideal candidate for each vendor based on the vendor's strongest areas. By reviewing these graphs and then using TEC's ERP Evaluation Center's WebTESS tool, you can determine how closely the functionality your organization requires, aligns with an ERP vendor's ideal candidate.
For each high-level criterion in the TEC ERP Evaluation Center's knowledge base, there are four graphs. The first two graphs are baseline graphs. In the baseline graphs TEC normalizes all criteria to an equal relevance, which allows you to see how a vendor's product scores on its own merit, without regard to any one module taking precedence over another. By checking the vendor's results against a normalized baseline, you clearly see the modules and functionality on which the vendor puts the most emphasis.
The second set of graphs is prioritized according to groups of criteria. TEC adjusts the baseline in these graphs so that it corresponds to each vendor's focus. The prioritized graphs make the vendor's strengths stand out against its weaknesses. A group of criteria increases or decreases its contribution to the vendor's scores according to the type of support the vendor provides.
When you go through the graphs for a vendor, notice that in each set of graphs (the baseline pair and the prioritized pair) there is a global priority bar graph and a contribution analysis spider graph. You can look at the global priority graph and by glancing at the height of its bars, see the criteria that are the vendor's greatest strengths. By comparing the baseline graphs to the contribution analyses you will see what the vendor supports in relation to a benchmark of the criterion's optimal contribution.
You may look at the ideal candidate pages for several different vendors, see one that seems to match very closely with your requirements and suppose this vendor's solution is aimed at your type of company. Be aware of the perspective from which you consider the criteria; let's consider Relevant Business Systems.
The first thing we see looking at Relevant's ideal candidate profile is the overall global priority baseline (Figure 1). This graph shows the functionality under consideration for the Relevant product where each of its factors have an equal priority. In other words, if the Financials, Human Resources (HR), Manufacturing Resources, Inventory Management, Purchasing Management, Sales Management, and Product Technology groups were all just as important to your company, Relevant's modules would satisfy the requirements in each criteria according to its contribution analysis graph below (Figure
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
The graphs in figures one and two are useful primarily as a way of seeing the raw results of what Relevant's solutions support.
To get a better idea of the top-supported areas in Relevant's product, you should look to the prioritized graphs (Figures 3 and 4).
Figure 3.
Figure 4.
Figure 4 shows that we adjusted the comparison benchmark to make it follow a path similar to Relevant's strengths and weaknesses. The prioritized global priorities bar graph (Figure 3) shows that Relevant's strongest point is Manufacturing Management, while its weakest area is human resources. Using only these graphs for an ideal Relevant customer, and the data available in the ERP Evaluation Center's knowledge base, we can determine a lot about the areas for which Relevant's systems are most suited.
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