Introducing RiverAI
From the Desk of Our CEO - Introducing RiverAI
At The Confluencial, we believe in helping the ERP community wherever we can, however we can. When we identify an opportunity to provide our knowledge and expertise, we want to take advantage of that chance. With the power of AI, there are now lots of new ways of adding value faster, cheaper, and more effectively. Things that should be easy should be allowed to be easy. That’s why we created RiverAI, our ERP Short List AI that gives you a customized ERP Short List based on your company profile in seconds. It’s easy. And it’s free.
I’ve been a part of software selections that run up a major bill and take a long time to produce an output that should be easier than it seems. Your consultant puts you through weeks of work to produce a list of six to eight potential vendors whose software might fit the needs of your business. And then it takes a couple more weeks to narrow that list to two or three. Really? Is it that complicated?
It's not. True be told, I can give you an accurate short list of ERP providers that fit your business after a short conversation. Tell me a little bit about your business – your pain points, your core requirements. What are your company goals and why are you changing ERP? How big is your business? With this information, the market is easy to narrow. The requirements matter later in the process, but to get to a focused point of the evaluation you don’t need to put in weeks of work that cost too much money to get to a list you’re going to Google anyways. So is your consultant. Or if they’re sophisticated, they’ll use ChatGPT.
RiverAI, who we refer affectionately to as Old Man River, is built on our proprietary HatchChart knowledge base that compiles decades of ERP experience, volumes of data, and the most up-to-date information about ERP providers. It’s job is to quickly understand your needs, your business, and your goals to give you a short list you can run with. This isn’t Google. This isn’t ChatGPT. It’s our own, home-made, self-taught AI.
RiverAI’s purpose is to provide the world with something that should be free – for free.
Giving It Away
Why? Because that’s the way it should be. And because getting your ERP provider right is not the most critical part of success in ERP implementations. I’ve told many clients who are struggling with an ongoing implementation that the software they already bought might not be perfect, but we can make it work with the right implementation network and quality execution. If you implement a less-than-perfect fit well you’ll go much farther than those who chose the perfect fit and bombed the implementation.
Put it another way – selecting the perfect software won’t save you from a failed implementation. Only good work will do that, and that’s why your ERP choice isn’t the most important factor in your success. You are.
What I want to do is save you the time and wasted effort of narrowing to a handful of providers so you can focus on preparing your organization for the work ahead. To me, there have been too many times where I’ve guessed at the short list in advance and been spot on six weeks later. That means that work added very little value to the short list evaluation. Let’s skip that stuff and get down to the meat of it. That’s a part of how I want The Confluencial to add value – by freeing your hands to do the work that matters.
So, What Does Matter?
I want to be fair to the conversation – what software you choose does matter. It’s often a multi-million-dollar investment that is supposed to propel your business into the future with promises of efficiency gains, data insights, and increases in effectiveness. Choosing an ERP that fits matters. Spending a ton of money on a short list does not.
Getting more efficient on finding the most competitive vendors for your business gives you the opportunity to do more important things. For starters, continuing to run your business. Too many consultants think that because you started an ERP evaluation that you’re all of a sudden totally available for them.
The other important things are wrapped up in Implementation Readiness. We talk about the confluences of your business – strategy, people, process, and technology. These are also the backbone of a successful implementation and just like a river starts upstream from its confluences, your successful implementation starts upstream from yours.
We want you to be able to make your Implementation Readiness program your primary focus in the early stages of your ERP journey. Study your confluences the way you’d study them on a river you’re going to float down. Know where they converge, where they complicate one another, and where you expect to streamline them to maximize value. Then layer ERP over that – where do you expect ERP to improve your processes and the effectiveness of your people? Where do you expect ERP to drive your people towards achieving your strategic goals? What technology will ERP have to interface with to pull it all together?
Use these guidelines to discuss what you need to do to be ready to kick off your implementation and establish your Implementation Network. Take a close look at how you expect to do the work and who will do it for you. Define your internal Core Team, your Subject Matter Experts, and your supporting cast of Project Managers and Business Analysts. Your system integrator will have a role, so will your ERP provider. Take the time to understand what they will do – and what they won’t do. From there, find the holes and look at ways to fill them. The people who implement for you matter, make sure you choose them carefully.
Lastly, the plan you put together at the very beginning matters. Not because it’s exactly because that’s how your project is going to turn out, but because it needs to include all of the workstreams. Your processes are going to change – that should be included in your plan. Your team is going to need to be available at high capacity at key points, that should be included as well. The steps towards implementing of course are important, but don’t forget to plan in how you’re going to build key integrations, your phasing, where you’ll have key milestone events, what critical communications will go out and when. Pulling all of these together is your Integrated Project Plan, and the fact that it’s an integration of major workstreams matters. It’s also how you make sure that your target go-live date makes sense.
You can take our short list and reach out to the vendors on it and run your ERP evaluation from there. Doing so will make a difference. But it’s not a silver bullet, you still have to do your homework. Know where you expect your changes to come from, who is going to be a part of your Implementation Network, and what your Integrated Project Plan looks like. If you get those things right, that’s what really matters.
Pulling it All Together
You can talk to RiverAI at here. It’s free, it’s fast, and in a matter of minutes we’ll give you a short list of ERP vendors who you should consider for your journey. Talk to it like you would a consultant – feel free to share things that you’re not sure how to articulate, challenges you don’t have the answers to, and what you expect a new ERP to do. It’s job is to take your thoughts and create a meaningful assessment of them. If you have questions or feedback, we’d love to hear what you have to say - RiverAI will be learning about businesses like yours from here on out.
We want to make your ERP journey as successful as possible. Giving away information that should be free is easy. The hard part is up to you. If you find that the things that matter are looking a bit overwhelming, let’s chat. We’ll give you pointers on where to start, what to look into, and how you can make it more consumable. If you need more help, we’re here to lend a hand.
At the end of the day, that’s what matters.
Fun Facts About RiverAI
When my son was born, he looked like a tiny old man just like I’m sure many infants do. We took to calling him Old Man River almost instinctively. Today, we still call him River Man. When we built this tool, it was fun to bring him into the life of our business and make a part of it about what truly matters most – family.
We’re a family of fly fishermen and women. We’ve found that matching the needs of a business to a software application is a lot like matching the fly to the fish on the river. Our HatchChart knowledge based is named for this – taking the factors of the situation and making a choice that produces a positive result.
RiverAI is a learning tool – we’re keeping it up to date! We teach it more and more very day. If you’re a vendor who has feedback on their product and wants to provide new information we can add to our knowledge base, we want to know. Drop us a line.
If you have feedback on RiverAI or want help with your ERP journey, feel free to reach out to me directly at adam@theconfluencial.com. I’m always up for a chat on these kinds of things and love meeting new people.
