At a recent event for technology vendors sponsored by AMR Research, the question was raised about “what would make a perfect software vendor” from a customer perspective.

I’ve been thinking about that question, especially as there was far from any consensus at that gathering as to what that vendor would look like. To be meaningful, the characteristics of the perfect vendor would have to be realistic, meaning it can’t include things like “give us everything for free.” But that said, I have a few thoughts across a variety of dimensions.

We’ll start with a company’s goal when buying the software to begin with: results and value. I was talking to a friend at the AMR event, and we agreed that the “perfect” software vendor would have built a solution that started to provide “instant returns” from its deployment. This means that the buying company starts to achieve improvements in profits and cash flow almost literally from the day the software is turned on.

This is actually a big difference from many software applications, for which (of course) a strong ROI estimate can be built, based on improvements over time. But even when that time frame is as short as a year, how often does a company start putting money back in its pocket from day 1 after go-live? The reality is rarely, though there are some exceptions (more on this in a future column).

I think a perfect vendor would combine both its solution and expertise to accelerate this “time to value” to enable immediate returns.

What else would characterize our perfect vendor?

	Clarity and simplicity: the vendor is able to tell you what products they have, and what those products do, in very straightforward and simple terms. Does not require a game of “20 Questions” to answer this question, nor are the answers seemingly more intended to obfuscate than clarify.
	Well-trained sales people: Sales reps and account managers capable of answering reasonable questions about the vendor’s products, pricing, and policies.
	Easy deployment: Simplicity in the application (even if the underlying capabilities are powerful) and/or tools that enables deployment (from a software only perspective) in a few months with a modest level of both vendor and company resources.
	Remembers you after the sale: The perfect vendor would pay a high level of attention to its installed base, as demonstrated by actual resource allocation.
	Support and maintenance: Written support policies for bugs and issues, and consistent execution against those policies.
	Flexibility: Makes it relatively easy for you to change to configuration of the software when the inevitable changes to your business occur.
	Software that evaluates itself: The vendor’s software solution should be able to tell you when results are not meeting expectation, and even better, give you some intelligence as to why.

Now, I well understand the practical business and technology challenges that make it difficult for any vendor to achieve “perfect” status. I also strongly believe that even the “perfect” software vendor would not be able to achieve any thing like perfect customer satisfaction ratings – there just seems to be an inherent amount of dissatisfaction with software that no one will ever eliminate.

Nonetheless, I think we could also agree that many vendors have some ample room to move between where they are at and some notion of perfect. And buyers should be thinking this way when making evaluations across different vendors.

What do you think would make a “perfect” supply chain software vendor? Should more supply chain software providers focus on providing clear, immediate improvements in profits/cash flow from their deployment?

Let us know your thoughts.