Vendor Rating Updates: Process ERP, CRM, and Financials

Newly published TEC ratings are available for a number of software vendors. Individual reports are available for purchase, or you can review the ratings in-depth using the evaluation centers. Here’s a quick rundown of the updates.

Take note if you’re in the process of evaluating any of the following systems.

* enterprise resource planning (ERP) for process manufacturing industries
* customer relationship management (CRM)
* enterprise financial software

Our public data on the BatchMaster ERP system is now up-to-date as of version 8.10, which targets medium enterprises in pharmaceutical, chemical, paint, food and beverage industries.

TEC Vendor Showdowns Generate a Lot of Interest

Here at TEC, our most popular feature is something we call a Vendor Showdown. We take two or three vendors who market the same type of solution (ERP or CRM or business process management, or HR, etc.), and compare their functionalities head on. The results are based on the most recent RFI information we gather from the vendors.

As a quick example, our discrete ERP RFI contains a list of 3,690 feature functions. The vendors fill out the RFI by indicating whether or not they support each of the 3,690 feature functions, and if they do, how. For each feature function, the choice of vendor responses are: supported out of the box, not supported, supported via 3rd party solution, supported by modification, supported by customization, or not yet rated by the vendor. All we do then is run all the responses through our decision support engine and write an article discussing the results, illustrated by some graphs.

Well, our Vendor Showdowns certainly get noticed! We get a tremendous number of page views, and a lot of comments from readers and vendors alike. I think people want to get a high-level view of how different vendors compare one against the other. Of course, we remind everyone that high level out-of-the-box functionality is not the final word on which vendors are best for their organization. That’s why we encourage everyone to use our evaluation centers to do a free, customized vendor comparison, one that takes into account their organization’s business model and specific needs (the way a Vendor Showdown can’t).

If you haven’t seen a Vendor Showdown, here’s a link to one of the most popular ones we’ve done so far: it compares Microsoft Dynamics AX vs. Oracle E-Business Suite vs. Deltek Costpoint.

If there are any vendors you’d like to see included in a Showdown, please let me know. We’ll tally up everyone’s requests and try to include the most popular choices in future Showdowns. Also, if there are any other types of comparisons, promotions, or features you’d like to see on TEC, I’d like to hear from you, and we’ll try to get them published.