The Problem: Most businesses have substantial untapped potential in enterprise systems for which they have already invested. Additionally, change in business processes and in new enterprise software and collaborative technologies continuously makes enterprise software systems obsolete over time.

The Strategic Goal: Migrating inefficient, error-prone, and isolated business process controls (paper-based, spreadsheets, outgrown applications, etc.) to the control of modern and collaborative enterprise software is fundamentally a mission to make your company’s processes more effective, and in turn increase profitability and strategic competitiveness.

The SoftSelect Solution

Engleman Associates, Inc. offers an enterprise software strategic planning and business technology optimization processes you can trust—developed from the wisdom of more than 1800 enterprise software optimization projects. Any major business process optimization should have structure to model and effect changes to enterprise systems. Our offering contains the following four major elements: methodology, management tools, project team, and software research.

Methodology: The SoftSelect methodology is comprehensive and time-tested. It is fully documented and various training options are available for our clients so they may firmly lead projects and execute as much of the necessary steps as they desire.

Management Tools:  Use our project data and change management application to establish your current enterprise system’s (e.g. ERP, SCM, PLM) effectiveness and provide the framework for developing the strategic and detailed business technology optimization plan. This system offers methods and features to:

• Automate an initial core business process / enterprise software requirements profile that considers progressive and collaborative functions —a significant time saver 

• Record requirements, issues, tasks and project personnel, and link them together for prioritized management

• Produce analytical reports that show by functional area the:  

  • Potential of current software to meet objectives and the best improvement opportunities

  • Level of utilization of current software and improvement trends

  • Shortcoming of systems organized by requirement priority

• Establish financial justification for upgrades or specialty software and track ROI

• Enable management to actually monitor performance measures that show the health and momentum of the enterprise software and business technology optimization. (This is currently a market-leading and unique element of our offering.)

The Project Team: The team is composed of one, or more, on-site facilitators, SoftSelect methodology and research experts, other appropriate specialists, and members of your team. Our service delivery model ensures that the right talent is applied to the project. Common methodology and software tools, combined with tight coordination, bind this team for efficient and seamless service delivery. 

Enterprise Software Research/Insight: Real-time market research for testing the validity of upgrades and specialty packages is very useful. Our SoftSelect business unit maintains a comprehensive and reliable database of over 400 enterprise/business software packages and documented research techniques to access appropriate planning information for any software product category. 

Benefits of the SoftSelect Process 

• Gaining commitment and support from all involved: With the SoftSelect offering, you achieve coordination and commitment from management, the user and the vendor—down to the requirement level.

• Finding quick, low cost improvement opportunities: You can achieve results quickly at low cost and use the savings of improvement to fund more costly improvement opportunities later—in essence a self-funding improvement strategy.

• Overcoming obstacles: Improving complex business software is difficult and our tested methodology identifies and removes primary obstacles to success, including lack of internal staff availability, skills or training, inter-company differences, and systemic process problems. 

• Managing change: As a business evolves, you can detect, record and process new software requirements, track all aspects of improvement projects, and monitor actual system usage at the requirement level.

• Facilitate business intelligence (BI) initiatives: SoftSelect optimization framework greatly improves the ability of normal transactional systems interfacing with BI applications. The vision of executives watching real-time key performance indicators from a beach chair in Aruba is real. 

• Achieving a strategic advantage: Proactively manage important enterprise software to your financial advantage today and strategic advantage over time.

Just-the-Facts Webinar

It’s difficult to convey the strength of this offering via the written word. Therefore, please join our introductory webinar on enterprise software selection, implementation readiness planning, and system optimization. This webinar takes one hour and I assure you that this will be time well spent as we expose many best practices and good ideas. Finally, numerous reference sites throughout the United States and Canada can confirm that this process works very well.