7 Questions to Ask Before Augmenting, Replacing, or Upgrading Your Operational Software Systems

So you have a system in place for your sales tracking (CRM), project management and time tracking (PSA), and accounting (ERP) along with one or more marketing communication systems, contract tracking systems, document storage and asset management solutions. Maybe you have a single software solution, or maybe you have invested in individual operational software systems with integrations, either human re-keying or software data exchanges. In any case, you arrived at your solution through due diligence, system requirement reviews, business model alignment, and the all important system deployment and adoption cycle. The last thing you may be thinking about is looking to upgrade or replace what is already established.

Knowing when to look at software solutions instead of forcing your current systems to accommodate your changing business is an important decision.  Here are a few stories about our experiences.

When TOP Step Consulting was just getting started, it was decided to use NetSuite OpenAir solution to cover sales tracking, contract management, contact management, and account management.  The volume of data did not warrant additional tools.  A few data entries and updates daily or weekly kept our solution up to date with key reports available for data analysis. Contact exports to our email system worked fine to keep our customers informed and involved with the day-to-day user community information. Re-key of finance data into our QuickBooks solution was simple. Customization was done to track types of opportunities, sources of opportunities, and other account management activities such as how the contact was met and what interest they may have in our offerings. Life was simple.

Then we began to grow and mature as a business adding new offerings to meet our customer’s needs including outsourced Administration and Release Management.   This required us to set up a Help Desk to centralize our knowledge and ensure we delivered a high-quality user experience. With demand growing, our simple email communication and tracking weren’t sufficient to gather metrics for ticket logs, keeping track of vendor enhancements submitted, and other general information to ensure our team kept up with our customer’s business changes as well. We made the decision to get a support ticketing system and put that in place which has helped us grow that part of our business much quicker than we anticipated.

Then we moved into a higher growth pattern. With more volume comes all types of challenges.  Our simple data entry model with field customization to keep track of account items, contact information, contract status, and so on, became very cumbersome. Items started to quickly fall out of date that was not a high priority, so reports became unreliable. Our solution: split our account management and pipeline management into a CRM. By expanding into multiple operational software systems, we had to go through requirements, deployment, and adoption but it saved time on data entry forced into a system not meant for that type of data or volume. It also allowed us to grow our sales team and perform account reviews more easily as a company.

Decisions made right?  New technology and technology improvements will continue and often entice you to question your solutions.  We attended a conference recently which revealed more robust and feature rich ticketing solutions that immediately got our team excited. This raised the question – should we move off our current tool or not? At the moment the answer is no but the reasons have nothing to do with the technology. The key is knowing if we really need to move to another tool. What is deficient in the current system? Any features missing that would expedite our abilities to solve the problem quicker or communicate quicker to our customers? What about historical data – this would need to be migrated. How difficult would this be? And the bottom line question of ‘does this save the company any money in the long run?’

I find customers benefit from having some basic questions to use in deciding ‘is it time to upgrade’? Here is a list of 7 questions I ask before making these decisions:

1. Are we losing the ability to keep key information up to date for our reports?
2. Are we adequately able to communicate with our customers and know their account status?
3. Are we able to gather metrics from our services delivery solution to improve on our contract estimating, pricing, and delivery of the solution?
4. Have we reached any system limitations with the amount of data or active records we can track?
5. Can we data mine our historical information to extract information for analysis such as customer patterns, solution offerings, opportunity sources, and so forth?
6. Are we spending more time on administrating the system than spent expanding the company?
7. Have we forced any of our current systems to track data that is not a natural fit for the solution?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions above, it may be worth looking into operational software systems for one or more of your process areas. There are a lot of solutions in the marketplace and just as many integration solutions to make your company productive and empowered to face the growth you are working to achieve!