Vice President

During a session I led at last week’s National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Orlando, Fla., I identified several critical mistakes businesses make in their systems selection processes, regardless of the type of system. These include distributed control systems, order management systems (OMS), warehouse management systems (WMS), e-commerce or similar ones. Among the mistakes I noted were the following: * not having the right project team in place; * failing to develop detailed business requirements; and * limiting the search to a preselected number of vendors, based on the premise that “someone that somebody knows” said “this is the system you should get.”