What’s missing from your SaaS software implementation?
Software as a Service implementations can contribute significant benefits such as cost reduction, scalability, and ease of updates. However, there are several challenges that often occur during typical projects that can be avoided with proper scoping and planning:
Underestimating Your Unique Business Complexities:
By definition, SaaS solutions are designed to be standard and are very inflexible for unique business processes. A clear understanding, ahead of the design phase, on what can be standardized and what is non-negotiable is important to limit scope creep.
Cost Management:
While SaaS can be cost effective, managing subscription costs and ensuring they stay in budget requires careful planning. Hidden implementation and subscription costs, such as those for additional features, support, or exceeding usage limits, may add up. Proper upfront detailed scoping, pre-work, and agreement with vendors on critical tasks is key.
Integration with Existing Systems:
Integrating SaaS solutions with existing systems and other SaaS applications can be difficult with respect to data synchronization, consistency across systems, and planning for the future. Careful architecture planning, assessment or middleware solutions, data conversions, custom development and legacy retirement are critical.
User Adoption and Training:
Ensuring that end-users are adequately trained and adopt the new system can be challenging, and resistance to change and learning curves associated with new software are common challenges. SaaS vendors often leave this to their customers. Thoughtful change management, training and adoption will help ensure success.
Here is how we can mitigate these challenges:
Develop a pre-work phase to define clear outcomes, detailed scoping and resource planning, and getting ahead of data and system integration alignment.
Apply ‘Lessons Learned’ from common SaaS implementations including, deep dives into business complexities, assessing vendor design approach, vendor resource assignment and availability, deployment approaches and upfront planning.
Engage experienced consultants with both business and software implementation experience to guide your project, help assess trade-offs and critical decisions, and to manage implementation risk.
The SAROS Group recognizes the importance of acknowledging the difficulties associated with SaaS solution implementations and thus, we want to ensure that the necessary steps are taken in order to properly integrate solutions into your company’s unique business environment. Contact the SAROS Group today to begin a consultation!
