Book Image

Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations

By : Grady Brett Beaubouef
Book Image

Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations

By: Grady Brett Beaubouef

Overview of this book

Using packaged software for Customer Relationship Management or Enterprise Resource Planning is often seen as a sure-fire way to reduce costs, refocus scarce resources, and increase returns on investment. However, research shows that the majority of packaged or Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations fail to provide this value due to the implementation approach taken. Authored by Grady Brett Beaubouef, who has over fifteen years of packaged software implementation experience, this book will help you define an effective implementation strategy for your packaged software investment. The book focuses on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations, and helps you to successfully implement packaged software. Using a step-by-step approach, it begins with an assessment of the limitations of current implementation methods for packaged software. It then helps you to analyze your requirements and offers 10 must-know principles gleaned from real-world packaged software implementations. These 10 principles cover how to maximize enhancements and minimize customizations, focus on business results, and negotiate for success, and so on. You will learn how to best leverage these principles as part of your implementation. As you progress through the book, you will learn how to put packaged software into action with forethought, planning, and proper execution. Doing so will lead to reductions in implementation costs, customizations, and development time.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
Summary of Challenges

Software design tools


As part of any packaged software demonstration, there is a review and exercise of the delivered software design tools available for customizing the packaged software. In isolation, the process looks simple and straightforward. The objective is to show the possibilities. However, keep in mind the following:

  • Demonstrations are conducted by seasoned professionals, typically with both technology and business expertise.

  • Demonstrations are based upon sample scenarios in a controlled environment.

Today, there is a plethora of software design tools available for software customizations and enhancements. It looks so simple! However, there is a very simple rule for packaged business software that is often overlooked and underemphasized:

Software changes increase Total Cost of Ownership.

Only when a customer's software change is incorporated into the base code of the packaged software will the software change not result in a reoccurring increase (i.e., upgrades) in Total Cost of...