The time it takes for the system to be implemented, buyers to be trained on the system, and for you start seeing benefits is as quick as 4-6 weeks.
When searching for a new purchasing solution, many organizations spend many weeks, months or even years trudging through the selection process. Most solutions take half a year or more to implement, costing companies hundreds of project man hours and lost opportunity costs.
This costly process has been alleviated because we have taken the approach of developing standard interfaces. Interfacing, as opposed to integration, is much simpler. Transferring our interfaces back and forth can be as simple as text file transfers on a network, to FTP to WebServices.
Having standard interfaces means that we can maintain one and the same solution for all our customers. We can upgrade any or all of our customers, and there is no need for any customer to do any further work. Once the interface populates our standard interface tables or files, no more work is required from the customer’s IT department.
With this technical and buyer implementation process, our customers achieve benefits earlier and save money overall during the implementation phase.
Unbelievable, but true
For our clients who already have JDA’s AWR (E3TRIM solution), we have fully implemented our HIMPACT solution in only four hours of client IT involvement. In most cases, it will take only one to two man-days of the client’s IT staff and then two days after that on the back end before the solution is up and running in our offices and the client’s.
The next step is to configure the client’s production server, whether on premise or in the cloud. Over the next week or two, we work with our client’s project coordinator to verify the imported data is correct and that the interface exchange process runs automatically.
For clients who are running an ERP solution where we already have established interfaces, the process can be just as fast.
For other clients, whether you are running on a home-grown solution or any of the largest ERPs, the amount of time to write programs to fill up our standard interfaces so we can build HIMPMACT typically takes one man-hour week. A second man-week is then required to coordinate, either with a third-party integration provider or the ERP solution itself, to determine and build best way to transfer POs from HIMPACT back to the host system.
What does this mean for you? The time it takes for the system to be implemented, buyers to be trained on the system, and for you start seeing benefits can be as quick as 4-6 weeks. That timeframe isn’t an anomaly, it’s standard for our implementations.
Another advantage is that we don’t “crash over” to buying every vendor on HIMPACT after the buyers are trained. The buyers will continue to buy on their old system initially. Week by week, they will configure more vendors in HIMPACT.
We believe in the crawl, walk, run philosophy. The buyers start with the simplest vendors first. As they gain more knowledge and confidence in the system, they can then tackle the more difficult vendors and items. This creates a higher and faster user acceptance and better results while minimizing disruptions.
It also means that some users will be 100% buying on HIMPACT before others. That is also a good thing. Depending on the other responsibilities of the buying team, and the SKU counts they manage, all items are typically being purchased on HIMPACT within two to five months of the initial training week. A total of three training sessions are most typical during this roll-out phase.
With this technical and buyer implementation process, our customers achieve benefits earlier and save money overall during the implementation phase. As an example, our costs for technical implementation and buyer training combined is typically between 15-25% of the License Fee.
