At Touchstone Spend Management we have helped hundreds of organisations deploy systems to tackle their purchasing and procurement system requirements and the main conclusion we can draw is that this is less to do with technology and far more related to the culture of an organisation. Hence most implementation project plans heavily feature change management alongside the physical deployment of the application.

For us, it’s important to understand that every business is just a little different from the next and that the people who will be users of the system can make or break a deployment. The deployment of a system can only be considered fit for purpose if it considers the likelihood of successful adoption by the user base. That is why our consultants are business-process focused and provide best practice guidance over simply being software experts; they understand that, just because you can do it a certain way, you don’t have to and in some cases you certainly shouldn’t!

Culture and change management aside, the two traditional problem areas for a project are reporting and integration. Understanding the different types of outputs that users and stakeholders will need is key to getting reporting right, and integration is one of those areas that you simply have to have years of experience in; like most tasks it really only gets quicker and easier once you have done it a few dozen times before.

The Touchstone Spend Management team provide a range of Integrated Services that cover all of these critical requirements and they consider the success of a project to be directly linked to the time and attention to detail spent in these areas.