- Let’s have a meeting. You tell us about your business. We’ll listen. Even at this stage we’ll be able to give you a pretty accurate indication of costs.
- We can carry out a pre-study. It’s an extremely inexpensive way of showing what we can do for you. We can take your historic data, create a quick and dirty custom system for you, and let you see the results.
- We run a pilot. We take part of your operation – say a product group or a small collection of stores – and implement our systems. Together we can fine tune the software to work the way your business works, add and customise the features you’ll need, strip out any you don’t. You see your business and our systems working live together. At this stage we can give you a guaranteed price for the full implementation. With just one exception, every company in six years for whom we’ve run a pilot has said ‘Yes!’
- The full implementation. We take everything we’ve learned from stages 1-3 and put it into practice. We train up a super-user picked from amongst your staff or hired by you. They’ll run your system and make all the changes you’re likely to need in the future. We’ll train a back-up administrator for when your super-user takes a holiday – just to make sure everything runs smoothly. We’ll make sure everything is just as you want it, that you’ve created rules to handle the day-to-day and the exceptions so you can concentrate on the one-offs and the unexpected. Stages 3 & 4 typically take just 3 months.
- We’ll be on hand in case there’s any fine tuning needed once it’s all live. After that we’ll be there whenever you need us, but from past experience you won’t need us very often at all. But we’ll drop round for lunch every once in a while just to see how you are.
As Benjamin Franklin said; “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Most people feel the same way about consultants. We aim never to outstay our welcome.
