When you are going through the process of selecting and implementing a new system, your attention to the details and your follow up are important.

During the selection process, be sure that you get references. Be certain that those references are very similar to your company and interrogate them thoroughly. Make site visits if possible. When you talk to the references, be polite, but don’t be so polite that you don’t get the information that you need.

When you have a demonstration, be sure that you have your list of features – List them as must have, like to have and would be nice features. Don’t let the salesperson off the hook when he or she gives you “marketing answers”. Make the salesperson demonstrate the specific way your important capabilities are handled. Many system will do the things that you want, but sometimes the process is so cumbersome that it isn’t worth it.  Often the system will simply not meet a particular need. If it doesn’t, that could be a disaster when you try to install the system.

After you choose the new system, it is important to follow through as well:

Once people are trained, follow up with them to see what they learned. Clear up misunderstandings while you are in the “sample company”  phase and you won’t have to deal with problems created by lack of knowledge after you go live.

We once had a client who started implementing our system and their people misunderstood our “sample company” method. With our sample company method, no real data should ever be entered into sample company. The sample company is strictly for experimentation.

Well, this client didn’t check on their employees and a few of them were entering real data into sample company. The manager never checked their work and we didn’t discover for 2 weeks that this was going on. Fortunately, we did discover what they were doing before we copied the live data over the sample company (something that we routinely do). If we had copied the data, the client would have lost all the information that they entered.

Quite simply, don’t expect what you don’t inspect.