Are spreadsheet checklists useful?
Filed in archive Point of view on May 8, 2006
Companies can be overwhelmed when looking for ERP, SCM or other business solutions. In order to facilitate and standardize their decision-making process, most companies build elaborate RFIs, with extensive spreadsheet-based checklists where different products are compared across potentially hundreds of attributes and factors. These processes tend to favor larger vendors and complex products and often produces an extremely homogeneous shortlist of "winners" with look-alike features and attributes.
In this situation, the question is are these methods good enough for selecting business systems? or do we have to think of other ways for evaluation?
Permalink: Are spreadsheet checklists useful?
Tags: solution evaluation
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Response from:
Mike Pollock
(05/09/06 12:20am)
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Over long, over complex or over simplified RFI's are extreemly time consuming for both the purchaser and the vendor.
Often RFI's are written by mulitiple departments and will contain the same question multiple times.
The questions are most likey to be expressed as 'can software do this' not as 'we need to acomplish this... how does the software allow us to do it?' which means that a vendor has to use 'yes but' in most of the responces.
These problems could easily be resolved by having a conversation: The purchaser identifies the business requirements (in a excel checklist), advances it to the vendor and arranges a meeting if the vendor thinks they can meet the business requirements. At the meeting/ conf. call the vendor and purchaser discuss the issues and then fill out the 'hows' in the spread sheet.