It is not a secret that local consulting firms are often new software sale oriented. If initial sale is over and system is implemented in its basic functionality you as customer might feel slightly disappointed with your consulting firm losing interest to your project.
It is good idea to think about the second phase and its challenges. Here you probably feel that your users are trained and system works. However now you would like to implement custom integration with something like ecommerce portal, EDI or external application or database. In phase two consulting needs are shifted from CPA style functional consulting to technology oriented one. Local partner might have one or two programmers in staff or as preferred subcontractors but they probably do not have enough workload to specialize in coding or complex reports design. Where should we look? Let’s try to give some recommendations:
1. Technology oriented support has to address nationwide market. This is probably sad news for somebody looking for programmer living in your city. But it is what it is. We are competing on the marketplace and if workload is too small then the business model doesn’t work for local folks
2. Regional technical support call-centers and software development factories. Usually these are where secondary ERP consulting customers end up. Technology firms are staffed with programmers, project managers and quality assurance people. They are grouped as call centers or software development factories
3. Supporting tools. These are web sessions technologies such as Citrix Gotomeeting and WebEx to name couple of popular. Comparing to the past where author had to jump into the car every morning, commute to the customer with median commuting time around one hour, then spend the whole day onsite and finally commute back to the office nowadays the author spends most of the time at home serving remote and local customers over web session and using Skype VOIP. The difference between local or remote customer is very thin
4. Customization tools and technologies. We would like to mention software development in SAP B1 SDK. Software Development Kit has formalized objects and tables diagrams as well as code samples in C# and VB.Net. Coding is usually done in Microsoft Visual Studio with reference to code snippets. There is possibility to program cross-platform integration by enveloping SDK code into XML SOAP Web Service which could be callable from something like Linux hosting PHP/MySQL application
5. Second Opinion. Of course everyone should be decent in doing due diligence work. However we saw situations when customer was too attached to specific consultant and the job was really screwed up and ended up in dead lock. But you should know that there are other folks with different experience and approaches. Make your search via Google, Yahoo or MSN and talk to possible candidates
6. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904, help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, Atlanta Georgia, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA and Canada nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). We are working on Brazilian ERP consulting market in Sao Paulo since 2004
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