Step 3: Choosing the Solution and Partner Wisely
Picking the right solution in an emerging area can be tricky: multiple vendors all make the same claims, use the same buzzwords, and promise incredible results. For manufacturing leaders who aren’t necessarily that experienced in buying digital solutions the challenge is even greater. And while even the best technology alone won’e guarantee success, getting a poor solution and partner can doom any project to failure. So how do you ensure the solution will meet the needs of your organization?
First make sure you know what those needs are.
Get with your team and describe (in regular language, not technical jargon) what the major problems you’re trying to solve really are. Don’t list a thousand possibilities but make sure you’ll know what the centerline is for the solution. While many solutions might overlap, each will have different strengths and weaknesses so you’ll want to be sure the strengths align with your key goals, and the weaknesses are not ones that can derail success.
Describe the world after.
What do you want your operations to look like once the solution’s in place? How will the team work differently? What metrics will you be influencing? What new opportunities would you like to create in your business? It’s one thing to say you need a solution to reduce rework by 15 percent. It’s another to say you want to see the team spending less time on non-value added work and more on new projects and innovation in growth areas of the business. Also make sure you know what else you’ll need to have in place to achieve that higher goal. If you want the team to focus more on innovation will they need any new skills or training? How will you structure that work into their day? Knowing all that in advance will help you keep your eye on the ball when the inevitable twists and turns occur during selection and rollout.
For Saas offerings make sure you’re looking at the whole vendor, not just the product or technology.
With SaaS solutions (and software in general) the vendor’s whole company makes an impact on your ability to succeed. How does customer success work? What are their incentives and measurements? Who will be the people supporting your team? How does billing work? Frustrating and unclear billing for SaaS solutions can be as big a headache as a missing feature. What’s the vendor spending on R&D and will you get a voice in their plans? When you buy a technology solution in a new area you’re buying into what it can become in the future, not just what it does today. Make sure you’re thinking about future needs or possibilities. And do strategy sessions with a few of the most likely vendors to see where they intend to take the product over time. You’ll learn a lot about what might be possible in the future (since their roadmaps are influenced by what their more mature customers are asking for) and you can help eliminate the risk of a product that evolves in ways that don’t meet your needs over time.
Look at ROI not just price.
Berkshire Hathaway stock trades at over $400 a share which is a lot compared to similar companies- but investors still see it as a great value because of the return on that investment over time. Technology solutions are the same way. If two solutions both can prove to deliver over a 3X ROI but one costs more, that means the more expensive one actually delivers more return over time not the same or less. Obviously you need to be able to afford the solution so price matters- but for solutions that impact critical elements of your business, price matters less than the value you’ll see over time.
Be open with your vendors.
Share data and be open about your issues- ‘playing poker’ with vendors by keeping things close to the vest doesn’t help you negotiate better, it just makes it harder for the vendor to really help get you the best solution. Be honest and make sure they’re open and honest as well. If they make claims, ask for the evidence. If you find you are not willing to trust them in the sales process, you probably wont be willing to trust them afterwards, which is fatal to a true partnership.
Make sure you’re buying process will reflect the reality after you purchase.
If you do a trial or pilot, make sure it’s representative of the actual environment the solution will work in later. And make sure the pilot can really address the key criteria you set. Sometimes, for example, we see potential customers that want to pilot our machine health solution on only a handful of machines. If their key criteria for success is how the user interface works, then that pilot would make sense. But if they’re looking to prove the solution can detect potential failures, or that their teams can actually change how they work to get the full value from such a solution, then a small sample of machines over a short period of time probably won’t give them enough evidence to know either way if the solution can deliver.
Think of the capabilities you’ll need at scale, not just day one.
If your business is global, can the potential partner prove they’ve rolled out their solution on a global basis with success. If you’ve got a strategy for creating an integrated tech stack around manufacturing insight, can the vendor integrate into your other key solutions down the road when you’re ready. If you’re looking to do best practices and benchmarking of different sites over time, can the vendor show dashboards or reporting that would help you to do that in the future, even if today you’re just rolling out on a few sites to start. In technology speak that’s known as ‘future-proofing’ the solution- but it will keep you from having to make a switch down the road when the vendor’s capabilities no longer can meet your growing needs.