Overview

We were selected by The Cotswold Company to help them evaluate and select a new ERP vendor to address a number of business challenges driven by their fast growth, complexity in their omni-channel offering and desire to efficiently replenish stock and forecast product demand. The Cotswold Company is a UK based furniture retailer founded in 2005 as an eCommerce pure play whose products are timeless, rural classics. More recently the company has invested in stores with a plan to add more however the vast majority of sales are still delivered through the eCommerce channel. The business is currently seeing significant growth across its operations and the time has come to invest in scalable back office technology and processes to help achieve their five-year growth plan.

Business Challenges

As with all fast-growing retailers the back office processes that were fit for purpose a number of years ago are now becoming inhibitors to growth. Technology can help support new more streamlined processes and automate the manual tasks which make operations slow and cumbersome and this was the main objective of the technology re-platform.  In particular the company suffered from no single version of the truth for inventory, for customers and for product with lots of excel based tasks leading to accuracy issues and unwieldy spreadsheets. A key business challenge has been to accurately forecast demand in order to improve associated supply chain efficiencies, minimise waste, develop the right new products and to ensure that customer demand is serviced with the correct supply. The Cotswold Company had multiple systems for price planning, stock levels and availability resulting in discrepancies in key data with the problem growing with the success & growth of the business.  Removing manual process is often one of the biggest drivers for ERP change but data accuracy in this case was also very important. You cannot make sounds decisions without sound data!

Challenges with ERP evaluations

There are many vendors proclaiming to solve the back-office challenges for retailers so targeting the most appropriate vendors to include was a challenge in itself. Coupled with the impact of Cloud and Automation and identifying a true cost of ownership; which many vendors have become skilled at hiding makes ERP selections particularly difficult. Many vendors are now selling Cloud-like offerings but it’s important to understand what they mean by Cloud. In many instances the vendors are merely offering a hosting service without any of the benefits associated with the Cloud such as elastic scalability, upgradability and lower maintenance effort. We see this trend across other technology disciplines too, most notably in eCommerce. 

Evaluation Process & Selection Strategy

The Cotswold Company decided to evaluate seven vendors in total which included a mixture of well-established traditional market leaders and SaaS based vendors that specialised in retail management to full ERP. The first phase of evaluation centred on establishing functional and non-functional fit against the business requirements with cost and timeline a key metric for shortlisting. We down-selected to four vendors and spent more time with each during a pitch and QA process. We then focused on understanding what each provider was really offering and whether that met the long-term requirements of the customer which led us to focus attention on two vendors. We then spent time assessing the non-functional areas and also identifying and understanding the associated risks around project delivery. At the same time we undertook detailed customer reference calls which focused more on the project delivery experience. Functional and non-functional matches were relatively similar so it was the due-diligence on customer references, project delivery risks and timelines where we learnt the most about which solution was more appropriate. 

Result & Lessons Learnt

The Cotswold Company are now moving forward into the project with our team supporting on project and programme management and commercial budget management. The appointment was de-risked by procuring a discovery phase to identify the exact solution configuration and integration architecture and only once that was completed were the software and services agreements signed. This approach ensured that we identified all cost and risks before signing any commercial contracts.

One of the biggest lessons was the detailed customer reference calls as we learnt and inferred much more from these. Many people referred to the ERP project as “open heart surgery” and we gained insight into the impact of the project on the organisation and this is where we began to see telling differences in the vendors we were assessing.  We spent around one hour with each senior decision maker on those reference calls and with at least three reference calls per vendor. We also conducted off the record reference calls with contacts we personally knew had worked with the vendor but that wasn’t provided as a reference by them – again hugely interesting to hear feedback where the customer reference had not been primed in any way by the vendor. 

Finally understanding the vendor roadmap and approach to upgrading the software and the associated costs, timeframes and impact on the customer was very informative in coming to a decision on which technology vendor to go with. Coming up with your own metrics on total cost of ownership will help you identify the most appropriate solution provider but also ensures you go into the relationship and project with your eyes wide open.

“Paul and the team have been instrumental in our recent ERP system selection project. Not only were they successful in negotiating us a substantial saving on our licensing and professional services costs they helped gain us favourable contract terms. Their specialist experience in working with large system integration projects and software vendors has been invaluable”

— Rick Bisset - IT Director

‍