Fifteen Questions You Should Ask Any Potential ERP Software Supplier

Looking for Enterprise Resource Planning software? There is no lack of it out there and the costs of making the wrong decision can be staggering. In some research I came across this interesting white paper from Technology Group International that provides some sample questions to ask your prospective ERP software vendor.

1. Will you provide full source code in the price of the software?

2. Will you provide a risk-free trial period on the software during which we can return it for a full refund?

3. Is the software written in a commercially available development language which is still being enhanced and supported by the supplier?

4. What is the cost for the first and subsequent years’ maintenance with your software?

5. When a call is placed to your support organization, who is the first person we talk to and what is their background and experience with the software?

6. What is the average amount of time that lapses between a report of a non-mission critical bug and the ‘fix’ becoming available in the software?

7. How does your organization compare to other organizations in your industry relative to revenue per employee?

8. Does the system come with a fully integrated Warehouse Management System (WMS) as part of the software cost?

9. Does your software include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality as a separate module?

10. Are there any restrictions as to which database, hardware platform, network, or operating system environment the software can run on?

11. What is the typical ratio you have historically seen amongst your customers of implementation cost to software cost?

12. What is the typical implementation time frame for a company of our size?

13. What is the methodology you use to track project progress vs. plan from both a work completed and a financial standpoint?

14. Will you provide a guaranteed maximum cost for any work you do for our organization?

15. What level of effort is required to install future upgrades of the software?


There is a separate page devoted to each question detailing why it is important and what type of answers you should be looking for. Obviously, this is written by a software company that is trying to sell ERP software, so they aren't going to be terribly unbiased. That said, these are all excellent questions that you will eventually wish you had asked if you initially fail to.

I've always been a big fan of Kaizen, and gathering the information for a succesful application can be a real problem. ERP software looks like it is slowly evolving into something that will really help those attempting Lean and CI (continuous improvement)/Kaizen approaches to streamline there processes.