I was at a trade show recently talking to an attendee who’d been trying to replace their Production Management System, a project that had stretched into it’s 2nd year. The build was still only part live and the budget had been blown and the team was beyond frustrated. And the target feature list – a modest one – had never been the problem.
So what killed it?
Features and functions are the easier part of any workflow automation platform decision. Vendors usually demo them well, they compare neatly in a spreadsheet, and they’re tangible and measurable. What businesses consistently underestimate is everything else.
What determines whether your automation investment actually pays off to time comes down to four things:
- how quickly and cleanly you can onboard;
- how easily the platform evolves as your business evolves;
- how well you manage the internal change; and
- whether you maintain genuine agility — not just on day one, but on day 500.
If you can’t implement quickly and keep pace with your own growth, you won’t get to first base. A great feature set sitting behind an 18-month implementation doesn’t deliver ROI – it delivers project risk. And the single biggest source of that is the complexity hiding inside your existing operation – the bad data, edge cases and permutations in your products, rules and workflows that nobody has fully mapped.
So when you’re making this decision, focus your evaluation on six things:
- Order sources: how does the platform ingest and handle your existing order channels?
- Products: can it take your product range as it exists today, including all the edge cases?
- Workflows: does it map to how your production actually runs, not just a theoretical ideal?
- Business rules: how does it handle the logic and exceptions that have built up over years?
- Impositions: a) does it manage your imposition requirements intelligently and efficiently and b) how does it migrate the existing impositions?
- Ship and pack rules: can it migrate your ship rules and handle fulfilment logic without manual intervention?
Not whether it can handle them in theory – but how intelligently it takes what you already have and gets you live fast. The best platforms are adaptive. And if they can apply AI to handle the fuzziness – edge cases that would normally require manual intervention – that’s where you can get to outcomes quickly rather than spending months mapping exceptions.
Before you sign anything, ask:
- How long does a typical implementation take for a business like mine (and what are you charging for the implementation piece)?
- How do I add or change a product after go-live?
- Who manages ongoing configuration – me or the vendor?
- What happens when my business rules change?
- Can the platform handle my order sources and workflows as they exist today?
The goal is an automation outcome that delivers benefits fast. Not a project that drags.
