From streamlining processes to optimizing costs, the right supply chain execution (SCE) system can make a big impact in any organization, from warehouse management systems to transportation management systems, labor management systems, order management systems, enterprise resource management systems, and more.
There are dozens of vendors on the market for each system, and selecting the right one takes a significant amount of time and resources. Over the course of hundreds of systems selections and implementations, we’ve found a consistent, proven methodology to finding the right vendor that will drive long-term success and ROI.
Supply Chain Execution System Selection Methodology
For every organization that we’ve helped select a supply chain execution system, these are the steps that must happen to ensure the right selection is made.
Business Goals Alignment (WMS, TMS, LMS)
A supply chain execution system selection is a business decision and an operations decision. Before anything else, it’s critical to align the system you’re selecting with a core business goal. If you can’t identify which business goal the new system will support, then you might want to rethink if you’re making the right decision.
Beginning with business goals alignment will increase your potential return on investment (ROI) and ensure the technology actively supports strategic growth and operational efficiency. Here are just a few of the business goals that each supply chain execution system can help you achieve:
| WMS | TMS | LMS |
| Improve enterprise inventory visibility | Reduce transportation costs | Reduce labor costs |
| Increase order fulfillment efficiency and accuracy | Improve shipping SLAs (e.g. on-time delivery) | Increase employee productivity |
| Support business growth and operational scalability | Improve transportation planning efficiency | Optimize labor utilization |
Project Planning & Scope
Scope creep, or lack of scope altogether, is a leading cause of poor system selections. Your project scope should match the operational needs of your business and your available resources. Consider the resources available to you internally or externally via a systems integrator (SI). For organizations with limited internal resources, SIs can provide full support across project management, RFP management, contract negotiation, vendor market knowledge, and post-selection design and implementation.
Start your supply chain execution system selection process with a clear understanding of the involved parties and the project scope. Identify which stakeholders will need to be involved in the project, like C-suite executives and other leaders from operations, IT, finance, procurement, and other areas of the business. This will help you get a clear picture of the project’s length and required effort.
Project scope is deeply intertwined with timeline, budget, and ROI, so keep those factors in mind when creating yours. An SI can help here as well, defining your scope to ensure you enter the project with realistic expectations and goals.
Requirements Planning
Most businesses don’t need every single feature and function that each SCE system offers. Comple a comprehensive requirements gathering process before evaluating vendors to avoid over- or under-buying based on your operational needs.
When gathering your requirements, focus on the specific needs of your operation— functional, technical, security, and performance. Consider your future business growth plans, change management and training needs, critical operational functions, and common exceptions/manual workarounds that are slowing you down. Requirements gathering needs to be exhaustive of your current-state as well as your planned future-state to be of most value when sending RFPs and doing vendor demonstrations and evaluations. A systems integrator can be very valuable in making sure you don’t miss any key processes across your four walls.
Short Listing
Once you’ve done the above tasks, you’re ready to start reaching out to vendors. Notice how many steps precede this part in the project. Most businesses jeopardize their selection projects by skipping one or more of the previous phases and going straight into vendor identification and outreach. But without the proper planning and operational assessments, you’ll have no guarantee that you’re reaching out to the right vendors, and the vendors you do talk to won’t have a clear understanding of your scope, timeline, budget, or requirements.
Start by sending Requests for Information (RFI) to get a preliminary overview of the available providers’ capabilities. Then create a short list of four to six vendors, or less depending on your project scope, that you want to evaluate further and issue each a formal Request for Proposal (RFP).
Avoid issuing a “feature-rich” RFP—a massive spreadsheet of 500+ features, where vendors check ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for each one—which often provides responses that are narrow in scope and lack important underlying details. This makes it almost impossible to differentiate the vendors you’re evaluating and often leads to overbuying complexity you don’t need.
Still include feature questions in your RFIs and RFPs, but only ask about features that are relevant, critical, and unique to your operations, and include other discovery areas like operational compatibility, technology, security, and total cost of ownership.
Vendor Demonstrations
Vendor demonstrations are the time to see with your own eyes what each vendor’s system can do. It’s important that these demonstrations happen live in a physical environment, not via a PowerPoint presentation with screenshots or pre-recorded videos of functionality.
Never enter a vendor demonstration without a script. Demo scripts provide structure to what functions of the system will be shown, ensuring what you’re seeing aligns with your operational needs. By scripting your demos, you can minimize the tendency of vendors to deliver sales pitches, instead focusing on the relevant application topics.
In your demo scripts, prioritize the critical capabilities that you documented in the discovery phase and rank vendors based on if they meet your operational and IT requirements. Also, be sure to leave some time for the vendor to show functionality they think would benefit your operations that you may not have already thought of.
Vendor Evaluation
When scoring vendors, use quantitative data points, like functionality scores, total cost of ownership, and potential cost savings and ROI. Focus on each vendor’s currently available functionality, not their future roadmaps, and consider references from the provider’s existing clients that are in a similar industry and vertical as yours.
It can also be helpful to visit at least one of your prospective vendor’s customers that has similar characteristics to your warehouse operation to get a more authentic view of how the system will work in action in your environment.
Contract Negotiation
Effective contract negotiation is critical to your success after the selection. Here are some things to keep in mind as you’re negotiating:
- Determine if the license or subscription costs are user-based or transaction-based. If user-based, ensure there are options to purchase additional user blocks at a discount as your business grows.
- Specify the number of customizations or modifications included in the base cost and clarify the inclusion of add-ons or bolt-ons like YMS, LMS, TMS, slotting, and reporting .
- Request at least three test environments—one for initial development and configuration, another for QA, and another for the production environment.
- Ensure that integration, conversion, and add-on support are included in the implementation services and service rates are locked in for the project’s duration.
- Be vigilant about annual price increases in the Master Service Agreement (MSA) or contract and negotiate firmly regarding go-live payment fee expectations.
- Clearly outline the contract terms, ensuring there is an explicit out clause and establishing a resource resume and vetting process.
- Consider extended weeks of go-live support, ownership of data, intellectual property, and extensibility code, as well as product training and user conference attendance.
SCE Selection Leading Practices
If you follow this methodology, you will be largely set up for success in your supply chain execution system selection. Here are some other leading practices to keep in mind as you go.
User Experience and Training
An intuitive user interface will maximize user adoption, boost productivity, and accelerate time-to-value and ROI. Prioritize vendors that emphasize user experience design and provide comprehensive training programs to onboard your team effectively.
Keep in mind that a vendor’s training support is primarily for “super users” who are responsible for maintaining the system at an administrator level. Systems integrators are better resources for full end-user training support.
Integration Capabilities
Your SCE system will need to seamlessly integrate with the other software and hardware components in your ecosystem. Whether it’s ERP systems, transportation management software or mobile and edge technology, interoperability is key to achieving end-to-end visibility and efficiency.
Know what software and hardware systems each vendor can integrate with and their methods of integration (EDI, XML, /direct SQL injection, API, etc), and make sure your implementation partner is adept at designing those integrations seamlessly.
System Customization and Scalability
Choose a vendor that offers customizable solutions tailored to your workflow requirements. Scalability helps accommodate future growth and evolving business dynamics, so a flexible system that can adapt to changing demands is critical for long-term viability.
Keep in mind that while an SCE system needs to be configurable to scale with your business, a system with too many customizations will become cumbersome to use, hurting user adoption.
Here are some questions to ask when deciding whether to implement a customization:
| Question | Guidance |
| Would this customization increase our competitive advantage? | If yes, consider customization or extension |
| Would our customers know if this feature were missing? | If yes, consider customization or extension |
| Is this feature’s goal to conform the system to the way we’ve always done things? | If yes, consider evaluating process changes that would be supported by core functionality without customization |
enVista’s SCE System Selection Team can Help
A proven, vendor-agnostic methodology like enVista’s will help you select a supply chain execution system that meets expectations across the board, with executives, end-users, and customers. The key lies in choosing a partner that meets your current needs and positions you for future success as the market continues to evolve.
Ready to start your supply chain execution software selection journey? Start exploring proven selection methodologies and get expert insight on your unique business case.
