Vendor / Partner Selection

Through requirements fit, cultural compatibility, and due diligence, identify a trusted and capable solution and implementation partner to enable lasting success

Driver

You’ve decided that you want a new technology solution – exciting! But how do you understand all the options and then navigate through them? A Gartner or Forrester report is a great place to start, and we know you’ll ask a large language model like ChatGPT for thoughts, but there’s a lot of hard work after that.

Determining the best solution(s) and the best implementation partner for you takes a lot of painstaking work. If you don’t have the expertise and/or bandwidth to steward the process well internally, let us partner with you to do it right.

Outcome

You’ll move forward confidently with a solution that meets your business and technology needs. You’ll have a trusted implementation team teed up with requirements, implementation approach, and high-level timeline. And you’ll have a procurement-ready contract to move through approvals.

Approach

Why the emphasis on the implementation partner?

We’d argue that a new software implementation’s success (or otherwise) often has more to do with the team implementing it than the technical solution itself. The implementation team will provide best practices for using the new tool, help you set up your foundational structures and concepts (think: chart of accounts or data model), and be your guide to using the system from the beginning.

If the implementation team knows the solution inside and out, has true expertise around using it well, and sets you up for long-term success, they’re a true partner. If the team is missing any of these elements, the implementation effort will suffer. We want to help you identify a true implementation partner.

We will take you through a requirements prioritization process, refine a long list of suitable vendors to receive RFIs (Requests for Information), work with vendors and understand how their solutions can fulfill your requirements, narrow down to a handful of vendors for demos, and facilitate due diligence, ultimately getting you a procurement-ready contract and implementation plan.

We will help you identify the best implementation partner who has proven experience and knowledge with the software solution who can help guide initial and long-term usage.

We will complete thorough due diligence so you can be assured that the selected partner has good references and that you have an airtight agreement that protects your interests.

A client who’s done two vendor / partner selection projects with us said it best:

“Performing thorough due diligence in technology vendor selection ensures you not only choose the right vendor for today but secure a partner who will enable success well into the future.”

FlexPoint has facilitated many platform selections, and we offer you:

  • Expertise without an agenda: we don’t have a vested interest in which solution you choose, we just want to help you find the option that best supports your ongoing success.

  • Experience managing vendors: we’ve been through the sales pitches, juggled vendors’ insistent phone calls, and gotten to the heart of whether solutions truly offer the benefits you seek. Let us be an advocate and a shield for you through the process.

  • Anonymity through the initial stage: we’ll withhold your name during the initial consideration stages, until you’re ready to sign mutual non-disclosure agreements in advance of demonstrations and more detailed fit discussions.

“Our fin-tech organization needed to explore alternative enterprise content management systems. The FlexPoint team did an incredible job helping us discover our problems with the current system, requirements of a new platform, and opportunities to scale into the future. After completing the process the FlexPoint team laid out, we unanimously selected our new ECM system.

Our wonderful experience during the vendor selection process drove us to keep the FlexPoint team onboard for the implementation of the new ECM system. Throughout the implementation, it was apparent that the FlexPoint team would do whatever they could to help us succeed. They looked ahead for potential roadblocks, dove in to assist with challenges and advocated for us with various stakeholders.

We ultimately hit our target timeline and received extremely positive feedback around the new tool. We are expecting strong ROI for both financials and user experience thanks to the FlexPoint team’s guidance and participation.”

— Kevin McCollam, IT Senior Manager at Northmarq

Interested in learning more?