Vendor Credentials and Track-Record Evaluation

Number and quality of implementations.

• What have been the overall numbers of implementations?
  
  A successful implementation has many connotations
  • A project completed within time, cost and quality parameters
  • project achieving its business objectives
  • and users feel that project has been a worthy investment etc..

and each of them are equally important. A Vendor’s real capability (beyond its quality certifications..) is a real-life track record supported by references picked by the customer at random out a list presented by the vendor.

• What has been the number of implementations for the given product?
  
  Number of a Vendor’s overall successful implementations and the ones which are specific to the tool, which you are purchasing, can be very different.

Vendor track-record relevant to context.

• Vendor Track-record for given industry.
  
  Let’s say that you are a bank looking for BI solution. A short-listed Business Intelligence tool Vendor may have decent experience (say) in Airline, telecom and logistics management industries, but may have (say) only one WIP in banking industry. Given that BI has a lot to do with domain expertise, this will be detrimental factor.
  

• Vendor Track-record for given state of the company.
  
  Has the vendor done successful implementations in start-ups OR mature companies? Has the vendor delivered for companies diversified in terms of business and locations?
  

• Track-record for the given location.
  
  How many successful tool implementations are there within your location/country/region?

Customer references feed-back .

• Feedback from customers of various vintages.
  
  Feedback should be taken from various customers with varying tenor. Whereas tenured customer can provide a better take on middle term impact of the project, and an experience which is smoothened over many ups & downs of relationships with the Vendor.
  
  The recent customers where the projects have been recently completed OR are in WIP, tells us the current capability of the company and experience on their very recent products.
  

• Feedback from customers for the given contexts.
  
  Customers from your industry, locations and process frameworks will always be a better choice.

PLEASE REFER VENDOR EVALUATION MATRIX to enable an effective Vendor Evaluation.