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Accounts payable: a powerful document management and workflow solution
Accounts payable is just one area of office management where problems arise because of the sheer complexity of transactions, and the vast amount of paperwork that is generated. A disproportionate amount of time and administrative resources is...
Consolidating Debt? 5 Warning Signs Of A Shady Debt Consolidation Or Debt Management Company
Unfortunately, not all debt consolidation companies are legitimate. To avoid the shady companies, educate yourself on the debt consolidation process and watch out for these warning signs. Quote Unusually Low Monthly Payments A debt...
Financial Management Services
Financial management services are the services offered by various financial institutions such as banks, insurance companies, investment banks, etc., to help individuals or corporations in achieving their financial goals, in terms of accumulating...
Project Management: Avoid Work Scope Creep!
Copyright 2005 Kinesis, Inc. Congratulations! You've just got a new client for an exciting project that is going to be fun and profitable. You carefully discuss the work with her and she sends in a down payment. BANG! You are off and...
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Being in control of your time is important if you are a hard worker, with a family, and have other needs and requirements to meet. When you are not in control of your time, you success is at risk. To be a successful individual in life, you should...
 
Top Six Reasons to Buy Rather Than Build an Inventory Management Solution

Is building your own inventory management solution really your best bet?

The issues that companies face when they decide to build a solution in house are numerous: Scarce development resources, project cost overruns, delivery delays, unexpected technical issues, long-term maintenance issues. For these reasons, you should consider purchasing hosted, flexible, "out-of-the-box" vendor managed inventory (VMI) and web-based inventory solutions that can be running in five days, all at a fixed monthly price - with no delays, low risk and a lower total cost of ownership.

At Invendia we've often seen companies struggle with the decision to buy a technology or to build that solution in-house. The decision criteria typically are:

•Availability of qualified development resources
•Long-term maintenance staffing
•Implementation time and costs
•Project risk
•Process understanding
•3rd party objectivity

So, what are the top six reasons to buy rather than build an inventory management solution?

6. Availability of qualified development resources. If you have available resources that are experienced in developing web-based, distributed solutions then you should consider building your own solution in house. In addition, your staff should ideally be knowledgeable about leveraging development standards such as J2EE or .NET. If not, you should source an off-the-shelf solution that can readily integrate with your existing applications.

5. Long term maintenance staffing. Once you have a solution, how are you going to keep it current, from both a technology and from a process point-of-view? For example, in the last few years RFID, collaboration, wireless and countless other developments have forced companies to update their processes. With ever increasing innovations, you need to ensure that you are staffed to manage not only the system upgrades but any errors that you may discover. If you either don't have the staffing for this or don't want the headache, then you should consider a "bought and maintained" solution.

4. Implementation time and cost. How quickly do you need a solution? If you have ample time to scope your project, build a project plan, free-up resources, develop and test the application, then you should consider building the


solution.

Furthermore, do you have the budget to pull off an in-house project? What are the opportunity costs? What is your company's track record of getting IT projects completed on-time and on-budget?

3. Project risk. One major reason that organizations build in-house is that they want to build expertise in an emerging technology. Does this meet your organization's business goals? What if you find that the learning curve is long and steeper than you anticipated? Are you willing to take that risk? When you are scoping your project, have you considered all of the issues? Are you willing to stick to your original scope
when your users demand new features (scope creep)?

If you cannot mitigate these issues, then you should strongly consider a fixed price, packaged solution.

2. Process understanding. Collaborative inventory management(VMI) processes are
complex and varied as your trading partner needs. If you have many diverse trading partners (or may have in the future), building your own solution may not be a great idea (see "long term maintenance" above). Additionally, your trading partners may want to extend the use of the collaboration solution to their trading partners. Can they do this? Only if you are willing to get into the solution environment. This is especially important as your trading partners start to get more and more benefit from these solutions and may force you to switch to another solution.

1. Third-party objectivity. A critical concern for trading partners is that of data confidentiality and security. Most trading partners are leery of exchanging critical and confidential and feel more comfortable with a third party managing the data. Is this a critical issue for your organization?

Summary
In the nascent days of any technology, be it the car or software, many companies think that they can build the better mousetrap. However, as the technology evolves and becomes more complete, there are significant barriers to entry. As the collaborative inventory management field continues to evolve, there are enough reasons to give pause before deciding to build a solution in-house.

About the Author

Ken Town is VP of Research and Technology for Invendia, a leading provider of vendor managed inventory and web-based inventory solutions. He can be reached at kentown1@invendia.com or http://www.invendia.com.

 

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