Daily Archives: July 3, 2017

When Selecting Your Next Supply Management Solution Remember …

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
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This is something that should always be kept in mind when soliciting opinions on a perspective solution for Supply Management. Consider who you are going to ask:

  • Your co-workers.
  • Your peers on a user group.
  • Vendor references.
  • Vendor representatives.
  • Analysts.
  • Bloggers.

Consider their average perspectives.

  • Co-workers: probably didn’t look under the UI covers of potential solutions because, like you, they are too busy …
  • Peers: stuck in a single world view provided to them by their vendor … and they are gonna love it or hate it …
  • Vendor References: peers who absolutely love the solution (or they wouldn’t be given to you) …
  • Vendor Reps: there to sell their solutions, so they will give you the best of theirs and the worst of their peers …
  • Analysts … will give you a reasonably fair comparative analysis of the vendors they know … which are typically the ones that made their quadrant … which are typically the biggest companies and/or their biggest customers …
  • Bloggers … who will tell you everything they know … but unless you pick the blogger who specializes in that area … it won’t be everything you need … but, with the exception of analysts, far better than the rest because they do their research on each vendor they cover …

In other words, when trying to select a solution and soliciting opinions from your internal survey, not all responses should be weighted equal. Insight from those who have done their homework should be weighted more heavily than from those who quickly assessed a UI and decided they like the Amazon-one best (even though a B2C interface may be totally unsuited for the task at hand) or from those with restricted world views (which make them experts on one vendor in the final three but not the other two).

Keep this in mind if you want to truly select the best solution.