The Dynamics GP Blog

Picture this for your Start up company. The market potential is large, your sales targets are ambitious but doable and you’ve secured some early funding. Your business plan calls for a highly efficient, focased workforce using technology to drive through sales performace whilst minimizing costs.
Now you start the process of evaluating your technology system options and you come across a local software vendor, who appears to have some sort of solution for you. During this engagement you tell the vendor what you “beleive” are your unique requirements and he keeps on advising you that he can provide with a “customized” solution. You both get caught up in the “custom made” solution disscussion and then proceed to go ahead with authorizing the start of a project.

Sometime in the future you start to discover the following:

• You were not in operation when you finalized your requirements, so there were quite a few assumptions. Now your requirements are been refined, but your vendor cannot go back to the drawing board and start the “coding” again.
• The vendor does not really have the skills or experience to actually write an application that can get you up and running.
• The tools that the vendor uses are obsolete and in some cases even discontinued by the tools developer.
• The vendor builds software but does not have the project management experience or methodology to actually implement the software in an organization.

If you are a small start up company with limited capital you certainly cannot afford a slow, painful and chaotic implementation from a local vendor custome made software solution. There are some excellent “off the shelf’ packaged software systems, eg.Dynamics GP, which can, with a little bit of effort take you far beyond what any local software vendor can provide.

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A little news item that flew around the web last week is that MIS , Sages largest reseller in the US, suddenly closed down.

“We were not aware that they were going to be ceasing their operations on July 6,” said Dennis Frahmann, Sage vice president of marketing, when asked in an interview whether the vendor had any warning MIS Group would be closing its doors. He acknowledged Sage had “some insight” into the state of MIS Group’s finances, but declined to say more.

Now we don’t really know at this stage what the bad financial state of affairs that MIS must have got themselves into, but I wonder what “marketing circumstances” may have contributed to the melt down.

If this could happen to Sage’s largest reseller, what about the many many other partners both in the US and Internationally? (And their customers that have bought Sage ERP or plan to buy!)

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