Our CFO knew about ERP Advisors Group and said he’d worked with them before, so I said okay, fine. Not that I was skeptical, but I didn’t know what I was getting into. But I have to admit, working with EAG and the help we got from them was great and I appreciate it.
What we were needing, honestly, was a little bit different than probably most of EAG’s clients. The challenge that Spectralink had is that we were under an audit with a software provider for several years, and I walked into the IT Director role in mid-January.
I see the project with EAG as a success because it allowed us to finally settle issues and allow us to start moving forward with the new renewal and some other stuff. Also, it gave me insight on areas we can probably trim and options to challenge our software provider from a renewal perspective.
When we brought on EAG, we were trying to decide whether we were going to be done with our software provider completely. There was some analysis around that: What are we going to do with our current provider? But even with that, we still would’ve had to end up paying them.
But at the end of the day, the majority of the company’s functions heavily leverage and depend on our software provider. So, we’re not moving away from that as an ERP. We just can’t. But EAG also gave us some insight that we probably really should upgrade, even though there’s not much of an appetite to do it, we had to so we stayed current. I think that’s going to be my next battle. We can maybe leave it where it’s at for another couple of years, but sooner or later we’re going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade.
If we can do an upgrade, I would love to bring ERP Advisors Group back to help project-manage and drive that. It would’ve been nice to have known about EAG back in the day to get an objective view. The problem I ran into at my last company was the finance team would do anything that our software provider asked of them, versus getting an objective opinion. It would have been nice just to step back and do what EAG did with us, which is say, “Should you stick on it? Or is it not working, and could you move away from it?”
To give that honest, objective feedback I think is a good thing to get. I would love the opportunity to work with EAG in the future if we can do the upgrade and have EAG help us do it. I think it would be a success. Without ERP Advisors Group, I think it’d be a big challenge. There’s been some trust that’s been built up and the ability to say, “Hey, this isn’t right” or “That isn’t right.” We know what we have isn’t perfect from a support perspective, but it works. It’s not great, but it works. It’s solid, it’s decent, and I get that, but it was good to get objective feedback from EAG.
I think there was value from working with ERP Advisors Group because we really got to understand objectively how valuable the ERP system we have—maybe it isn’t ideal, but it’s what we’re stuck with—is for this company. And there is some direction and a roadmap of where to take it in the future. Whether we choose to do it or not, it’s a conscious decision but it is what it is. That’s what was good, we got that objective look.
I have no problem being a referral for ERP Advisors Group. EAG helped take a huge mess, straighten it up, organize it and get us to understand where we really stood and where things were.
