Product Installations – they should be easier

Making the decision to buy a natural gas application, whether it be to replace an existing system or to make the leap from spreadsheets can be tough. Not only for the energy company making the decision, but also for the vendor companies trying to provide solutions. In a perfect world, you buy an application, install it, add your data, and you are up and running. How hard could it be? Of course, the issue of the “slight configurations” often get in the way.

Companies buying products want to pay for a product, receive the upgrades, and not have to worry about customizations. Nor do they want to have to worry about either maintaining large IT staffs to run the application or having to go to the vendor every time an add or change needs to be made. One problem comes when companies aren’t willing to step back and look at different ways to do things. That leads to customizations that might not be necessary. When it comes to unique specifications, many might think, “You might as well add it to the product. It will make your product better and more flexible. Heck, you should pay me since you’re going to make all this money re-selling it.” The other mistake companies make is assuming that their business process will change. While it certainly makes sense to go to an “industry standard” way of doing things, it is often a very difficult task to convince the folks actually doing the daily work that the ‘the way we’ve always done it” needs to be changed.

One area where I see vendors and their clients getting into trouble is as follows. The vendor can comply and usually does provide a solution to a certain business requirement. However, the way it works in the application may not be acceptable to the customer for whatever reason. At that point, who needs to change? The company, because their requirement is not standard, or the vendor who said they complied? This can often lead to contentious discussions that no one really wants to get into. As a side note, in my personal opinion, if a vendor complies with everything you ask for in your Request for Proposal (RFP), with no comments, be careful.

The solution is to spend more time up front during the RFP process and the Functional Design Specification (FDS) once the deal is signed. Set expectations correctly, and everyone will be happy.

So, where does this leave us? It seems that vendors should provide solutions that offer flexibility without having to be everything to everybody. Trying to capture everything is a recipe for an application that is either continually being “debugged”, won’t have very many new releases, or won’t last very long. Energy companies should be realistic in their expectations as to what they expect and what their staffs will accept. Working together and spending a little more time up front will cause a lot less pain at the end of the process.

At the end, you just might end up with an application you are happy with that actually meets your business needs and keeps you and your customers happy. Then all you have to worry about is interfacing the application to the rest of your systems. Now those are really easy, right?

Robert W. Young
Product Manager