I am following up with a new post in my series “How to choose a Balanced Scorecard Software.” I hope you will find these questions useful. Today’s question is:
Can you model my BSC model in your software for free?
Background to the question
Implementing BSC software normally incurs a substantial cost. We have heard about ratios of 5:1 – where implementation cost is nearly 5 times as much as the software itself in many cases. In order to gain a good feeling about how much the implementation will actually cost, you should challenge each software vendor to come up with your new BSC model and show it in their tool. The vendors that have nothing to hide will do this for free, while the costly vendors will not do this for you. They might spend days and weeks doing sales activities on you, but they will not be willing to configure your BSC model to demonstrate how easy and simple it is. My recommendation is to “watch out”. You should request them not to use more than half a day or a day to prove this capability of their solution to you.
How to test the software vendor
Give them your departmental structure, BSC structure and challenge them to show you some of your most advanced KPIs with some drill down, graphs, reporting, and threshold system.
