When choosing a Computerize Maintenance Management System (CMMS) or Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system, you have a lot of options. There are many big and small players in the industry offering software packages or add-on modules to systems you may use in other parts of your business. Having so much choice can be overwhelming especially considering that this is probably a major financial expenditure and that it can greatly affect how your whole business will operate (whether negatively or positively) on a day to day basis. So how do you go about selecting the right CMMS / EAM system for your organization?
Some organizations choose to start with the software vendor selection. In some cases a parent company or a sister company has a product that is already being used and seems to work well for their organization. As such, some organizations start by exploring the software packages that they already know through their network and try to figure out which one would better serve their business based on the vendor demos and reviews of the software. While this approach can lead to a selection of a great product that works very well for your business, it can also result in some common pitfalls further in the negotiation and implementation processes.
One big issue to watch out for is the lack of clarity when it comes to detailed project scope and the importance of various software functions to your business. For example, you could just review the top 2 products that you know and based on their demos make a decision to go with the one that seemed to fit your business best. When you negotiate the contract, you keep the implementation scope to a pretty high level description of the relevant modules that you would like to purchase. However, when it comes time to implement the software, you realize that there are actually many tweaks (hopefully small) that you would like to make to the system but since they were not previously defined they will cost extra effort and money to implement. In this example, you might realize that had you known the detailed project scope earlier and the importance of various functionalities to your business, you could have been more effective in negotiating a software and services contract with the vendor that would get you what your business needs.
Knowing at a detailed level exactly what you will need from a software before you even see it or get to use it seems like an impossible task. This is where the business case for spending the time and effort to define your business requirements in detail comes in. Business requirements are typically a combination of statements, process flows and diagrams that depict what your business is looking to do. If done well, the requirements will focus on what is most important to your business, based on input from stakeholders throughout your organization. These requirements are typically drafted before any vendors are considered and before demos are scheduled.
While drafting business requirements can be a very time consuming endeavour (especially if you choose to engage many business stakeholders in the process to get their buy-in), the contribution this work can have towards selecting the best software solution for you is tremendous. For example, the documented business requirements can be used as part of an RFP document or sent before the demos to vendors. The vendors can then be asked to tailor their responses or demonstrations based on the specific requirements that were sent, especially looking to address the ones that were most important to your business. The vendor evaluations as part of the selection process become more subjective since each software package can be compared against a fixed set of requirements.
Many different people in your organization can have opinions about what they and the organization need from a software package. As alluded to earlier, you have a choice about how many stakeholders you involve in the software selection process. The more people you involve the longer the selection process well take and probably the more costly it will be to your business. However, by involving more stakeholders you give your employees a chance to drive change in the organization, give their feedback, and uncover some potentially huge requirements that you were not previously aware of. The opportunity to build buy-in from the people who will likely be the end users of the system should not be overlooked as well.
You have many options when it comes to engaging end users. You can use surveys to gather feedback, you can leave it up to the individual area managers to gather feedback through formal or informal ways, you can have facilitated requirements gathering sessions, you can draft the list of requirements on your own and send it out for comment to various stakeholders in the organization, or any combination of the above. Depending on the culture of your organization and how much staff time you are willing to dedicate to the requirements gathering can drive the option(s) that you chose. Although the payoff will not be immediately apparent, by the end of your implementation you will definitely see the value in engaging people and communicating early.
As you can see it can take quite a bit of effort just to select a software vendor for your CMMS / EAM implementation. Having a strong team to run this initiative is very important. Internal resources with a mix of IT / technical experience and strong knowledge of the business are top candidates for such a team. You can also consider hiring expert external resources to support your vendor selection process. Our team at StraNexus can provide a variety of support services from subject matter expertise on vendor selection, to facilitating requirements gathering and stakeholder engagement, to full project management of the vendor selection process. Please feel free to give us a call today to find out more.
