Many ERP providers are large and bloated and inefficient, and often slower, more costly, less friendly, and less responsive. Cetec ERP is a new generation of ERP.
As you proceed with ERP selection, we would like to share what our experience has provided. The biggest recommendation is – validate system functionality, especially before you buy. For instance:
Remember that “integration” is always the biggest expense with ERP. Integration = any functionality the ERP provider cannot demonstrate concretely to you right now.
Pick your difficult cases, and get specifics. ERP sales personnel will always shows you the easiest/best things to do in their system. The sales personnel know to say YES. When they say “our team can do that”, that is not usually the same as “it’s already supported”, and that cost will hit you. Be careful.
If you can, make sure you are talking to the actual engineer who will be performing the integration work, and get the cost/time estimate from them, NOT from sales. With larger and older ERP providers, this is most often not a remote possibility.
Consider “soft costs”, e.g. disruption to business, operational instability, etc. No one ever considers these, but they probably cause your business to lose the most money.
Consider how estimated implementation time length. This is something an ERP provider will not tell you up front, and very often implementations can drag out an unacceptable amount of time. If estimated implementation time is unreasonably long, find out what is the reason for that length, and get specifics. This can be a very interesting indicator of cost.
Other potential costs that will find their way to your plate (note that Cetec ERP skirts several of these due to our modern cloud deployment):
- Server costs or hosting fees
- Regular server administration
- Product support costs and user support
- Software maintenance and upgrades
- IT admin costs, e.g. installation and updates of software on desktops/clients
- Additional licensing needed to run the product (licensing and the respective support fees associated with those licenses), e.g. SQL server licenses
- Other hardware requirements
- Amount of consulting time needed, and at what hourly rate.
- Customization or integration work needed, and at what hourly rate (find out exactly who will be doing the development, e.g. in USA, foreign?)