For successful organizations, it is not good enough just to implement an ECM solution and hope to get the best of it. It takes time to plan, adjust and particularly time to pick the right vendor that will meet all the needs of one organization. As a matter of fact, when organizations aren’t taking the needed time for precisely picking the right vendor, it is more likely their projects will fail.

In this article, you will be shown that one of the most positive, cost-effective, and beneficial steps your organization can make when implementing new ECM system is certainly not to hasten the process of picking a vendor.

Determining the goals of your organization is essential while picking the right vendor. You will have requirements and it is up to the vendor to meet all of them. So, to ensure that you will pick up the best-suited vendor that will meet all of your organization’s ECM needs, consider the following steps:

1. Determine your Requirements

Before starting anything else, it is important to make a list of your organization requirements that will be addressed by the vendor you will choose. Enterprise content management has a huge stock of product categories, and the vendors are providing a wide spectrum of them. So, it is of high importance the end user to understand what is required before it can be suited to ECM vendor’s capabilities.

2. Request a Proposal from Several Vendors

The proposals you will get will help you narrow down your choice. Some vendors will disqualify themselves by either not meeting your organization’s deadlines or not be able to meet all of your requirements.

When you get the vendor’s proposal, there are a couple of things you should search for:

• New observations for the challenges your organization is facing
• Capability to efficiently configure, manage and develop the solution
• Confirmation of vendors experience and stability

Now that you have shortened your list of vendors, they will try to amaze you with their expertise and software.

3. Request a Demo

The best way to see if the vendor can meet all of your organization’s requirements is by requesting a demo.

Things you should look for in the vendor’s demo:

• Does the demo show that the vendor can meet all of your organization’s requirements?
• Can you trust this vendor?
• Do you think that the vendor can provide solid training capabilities and successful ECM implementation?
• Do you have confirmation of vendor’s experience and stability?

Take the time and review the demos of previously chosen vendors. Once you’ve done that, you will be able to shorten your list of vendors that can meet all of your organization’s requirements, even more.

4. Ask Questions

Researching vendors and inquiring their customers can take you a significant amount of time, but it must be done as to be sure your enterprise content management implementation will be successful.

Even if the vendor can meet all of your organization needs today, you need to ensure that the same vendor can also meet all of your future needs. Besides of identifying what the vendor product can do, it is also important to identify how it does it. This will have a major effect in deciding how you will tailor vendor’s product past the underlying licensing and the general cost of the ECM solution.

Take a look at the following questions every vendor has to answer:

1. What kind of support and team training does the vendor provide?
2. How scalable is vendor’s platform in terms of the number of users and functionality?
3. How much the vendor knows about your business applications?
4. How much does the vendor know about your industry?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you make the right choice and pick a vendor that is most suitable for your organization’s needs.

5. Choose a Solution That Can be Easily Integrated

It is crucial the ECM solution you pick to be easily integrated with your organization’s current programs, systems, and applications. In order your chosen ECM solution to deliver all wanted benefits and to meet all needs, it must seamlessly integrate with your system and applications.

6. Post Implementation Support

Even though the focal point of an ECM system is usually on installation and configuration, it is important to know how the post-implementation support will go. It is good to meet and build a relationship with the technical support team. This way you will reduce your costs, and save a lot of time.

7. Smart Investment

Before buying the vendors product it is important to determine whether you will need all the features that product provides. It won’t be cost effective if you are only implementing an ECM solution for one particular department but pay for the whole software suite. You want your ECM solution to be flexible and assist you in boosting your investment now, as well as in the future. If you decide to purchase the whole software suite, make sure you can use the product for various departments.

Conclusion

When choosing an ECM vendor, the capability to successfully meet all of your organization’s needs is vital. Picking the right vendor that will meet all the needs of your organization is a long-term commitment. You need to be sure the decision you make today will be the right decision for your organization in the future. Getting a flexible ECM solution that can be changed as your business needs require is a must for further success.

For your ECM solution to be the right one, it should come from a qualified vendor that focuses on constant researchers and product development. Every investment your organization makes needs to be smart, strategic and must deliver on a guarantee to help you today and the time to come.