Choosing the right Laserfiche Partner to assist your digital transformation helps determine your project's success. The best partner for your project can deliver and communicate real business value, map the Laserfiche solution to the prospective client’s needs, and whose client base demonstrates they understand specific requirements.
Selecting an enterprise content management (or content services provider) is complicated. While some organizations decouple the selection of business software from the selection of systems integrator, this method can be less effective and more expensive. Prospects are coming to the table with distinct software features and service delivery desires. The expectation is to prove their ability to conduct the technology mapping to needs analyses.
Successful project teams select the partners based on the depth of resources and knowledge, industry experience, implementation approach, and the critical but often forgotten support philosophy and capabilities. A good partner has a vital understanding of how a Laserfiche System functions in various business environments. Functional knowledge helps a partner determine the configuration options that best support necessary current and future state activities.
Inadequate support can pop up like some terrible surprise. A poorly planned support model can negatively impact the overall timeline and budget during implementation. Additionally, users can develop negative perceptions when affected by downtime, poor training, or lousy performance during implementation. Entire business operations can be severely limited after the go-live date. While we trust that all organizations do some level of due diligence prior to awarding the contract, here are a few points to probe further:
Ask about the overall application support model. Query the number of support staff, education, and experience.
Is there third-party support in the offering? When will they be deployed?
Will you get access to performance stats?
Determine the level of support you require. Some clients have a heavy-duty IT staff and don’t require much support; others don’t even have an IT department. IT staff may only want a “click here” answer versus business staff who may need an answer plus some training. Ask your prospective partner to provide you with references who will operate their Laserfiche system like you, not just “happy” clients.
Clarify the difference between support and professional services. For instance, is this support or professional services if you have workflows implemented in several areas under your initial contract and want your partner to develop or correct a new workflow? Can you level up your SLA to include some professional service hours?
Digging deep into a partner’s support offering may be some of the most critical analyses you do regarding your Laserfiche System. Please choose carefully!
