With some of our client’s projects, we sometimes see vendors offering to help identify a business’ order management and warehouse management requirements through a survey of your business. There is no problem with that. But don’t leap to the conclusion that this survey will produce your business’ systems requirements. What usually comes out of these vendor surveys is how well their system meets your company’s needs. Many times they are limited in focus and are more of a selling document.
Rather than how well a vendor’s system fits your business, the requirements need to be defining what the user departments are looking for the new system to do, and what the user community needs from the system across the business. The requirements need to be complete and to spell out what the company needs, information-wise, to grow and manage the business. Without documenting your business requirements yourself, it will not be a complete set of requirements and will certainly not be an objective set of functionality encompassing all of the requirements needed from the system.
Last year we saw a $50 million business have the system vendor document their requirements rather than do a complete requirements study independently. The vendor’s brief requirements study was allowed to supplant the complete requirements documentation. The survey did not obligate the vendor to any functional performance to meet the requirements within a stated cost. The client was lead to believe that the vendor’s system, with a limited number of modifications, would fully meet their needs. The client had a difficult first peak season because of the lack of functionality. After we were brought in to conduct a post-implementation audit, we found that there were dozens of modifications that had to be made after the initial system implementation. This lead to a total cost of ownership that was twice what management had wished to spend.
Unfortunately, deciding what your requirements are takes time and agreement among all users and departments. The requirements document becomes the document upon which all vendors’ systems functions are compared. The vendor responses to your requirements become the measuring stick against how all vendors’ systems are evaluated. Lastly, the document also becomes important to identifying what modifications are needed and a basis for the vendor contract.