ERP Selection: Water Gremlin Case Study

To trim the list further, the selection committee looked at the customers of each ERP vendor to see their yearly gross sales. “The sales level of [ERP vendor] customers was a very interesting metric we had never considered before,” Schulz says.

ERP vendors design their product for companies with a specific range of annual revenues. “If I’m a $100 million manufacturer, I don’t want to necessarily grab a software package whose sweet spot is for a $25 million manufacturer,” Schulz says. SoftSelect reports that the total cost of ownership, support strategies, and scalability of the software varies according to the revenues of the company.

(Almost) The Real Deal

To the five vendors now on the list, Water Gremlin sent requests for proposal along with “demonstration scripts”—documents describing typical company tasks, such as entering a new job into the system, that gave vendors a starting point from which they could create a tailored demonstration.

“Give your vendor a demo script. Don’t let him lead you down the primrose path,” Schulz advises. The script also included examples of special or oddball transactions the company experiences, such as one-of-a-kind orders. Schulz wanted to see if the vendors would be able to accommodate his company’s special needs, and he wanted vendor proposals and demonstrations to include real examples using Water Gremlin customers and product information. He gave vendors two weeks to respond. After reviewing the responses, he scheduled day-long software demonstrations with three of them.

Connor and Kent Myrhman, a field consultant for Minnesota Technology, worked with the ERP vendors to create demonstrations that reflected Water Gremlin’s unique business using Schulz’s script. “Oftentimes the [value-added resellers] will come with a canned demo,” Connor says, adding sarcastically, “and they always work.” During the demonstrations, Schulz was looking for ease of use: “Do I have to go through 16 screens to enter one sales order, or is this something I can do relatively quickly?”

Connor and Myrhman also helped assess the service and dependability of the vendors by asking key questions: Are you planning to merge with another company soon, and how will this affect customer support? Have software upgrades been made recently, and if not, how long do you plan to support the software? Is training provided before, during, and after an ERP implementation?

Last December, Water Gremlin purchased ERP software from Epicor Software Corporation, a California-based company with offices in Minneapolis. Schulz says the Epicor software was intuitive and easy to navigate. “Epicor, right off the shelf, works the best for us,” Schulz says. He adds that the other vendor demonstrations he viewed relied on writing custom programs or purchasing third-party “bolt-on” programs to make the ERP do what Water Gremlin wanted it to do.