General

Now the competition in foreign trade industry is fierce, improving internal management performance and reducing costs have become the practical interests of foreign trade enterprises. Many enterprises choose to use foreign trade software to improve efficiency, but how to choose foreign trade management software?

1、 Choose the standard version or secondary development based on the standard version?

The standard version is developed by the software development company into a mature solution version according to the needs of most enterprises in the market in advance, while the secondary development is simply to customize and modify the existing standard version, extend the functions, and then meet the needs of the enterprise. Generally speaking, the core of the original system (software design idea) will not be changed. If the company's business is very consistent with the standard process, select the standard.

According to my years of experience in foreign trade software development, the standard version is very suitable for enterprises. There are many reasons. The following article will introduce in detail. When choosing the standard version, you should at least consider whether you can develop on the standard version in the future. Now many markets are boasting about the SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, but I tell you here that you should never choose the SaaS platform in the business management software, The biggest disadvantage of the SaaS platform is that the demand for personalization is insufficient, the software is too rigid, and the secondary development cost is very high.

2、 Understand the main business direction of software developers

Each software developer's main business direction is different, and the distribution of profit sections is different, such as business management, customer relationship management, mail management, etc. Before purchasing software, you must distinguish their main business direction. This can be learned directly from their official website. Taking our foreign trade software as an example, our main business is business management software development and customized secondary development on the standard version. If the homepage of other enterprises' websites extensively introduces customer relationship management, customer discovery and email management, it shows that they focus on customer relationship, and business management may be incidental development. In this way, business management software may be very simple and cannot achieve ideal management results.

At present, Shiyang develops more customer relationship management (CRM), and the company is large, because the CRM system is standardized and the function is single.

3、 Don't blindly believe in Internet search rankings

Search ranking has no practical significance. Most of them spend money to attract and advertise. People are more likely to see more pages.

4、 Post service

This is very important. Post service is the basic guarantee for providing software. Generally, software developers will give away one year's service. After one year, it will be paid service. The specific service fees are different for each company. Most of them are calculated based on the ratio of software sales amount.

5、 Telephone communication, listen to the professionalism of foreign trade knowledge

Now that the Internet is so developed, it is not necessary to record developers in the local market when looking for foreign trade software. It is more important to find professional foreign trade developers than local ones.

6、 Data security

Carefully identify before cooperation. After cooperating with the software developer, don't worry about the developer stealing your data. If you worry, don't cooperate. The software and network are everywhere. If the developer intentionally steals your business data, whether it is a stand-alone version or a network version, as long as you open the software under the network environment, you can steal it. Therefore, we should carefully identify before cooperation, and trust software developers unconditionally after cooperation!

7、 Is the traditional mode ERP or SaaS?

Some people say that the rise of SaaS (software as a service) is a revolution in the IT industry, because its emergence has promoted great changes in the entire traditional software industry. In other words, the emergence of SaaS is an inevitable product of the development of ERP so far. Combining traditional ERP with the fashionable cloud computing is a major innovation in itself. Therefore, we can find out several points that SaaS is stronger than traditional ERP through cloud computing:

1. Low implementation threshold: In the traditional mode, many enterprises, especially SMEs, are often deterred by the threshold of one-time payment of high fees for software, and it is difficult to assume the responsibility of customers to manage and maintain software under the traditional software mode. SaaS only needs to pay according to the demand, so that customers will focus more on core business.

2. Large market space: SaaS enables faster product updates and can be used anytime and anywhere.

3. Low risk: The charging method of SaaS service is low risk. Flexible selection of modules, backup, maintenance, security and upgrade can enable customers to focus more on core business.

Compared with the traditional model, SaaS has so many advantages, but its fatal weakness for enterprise management software is that it has no way to provide enterprise featured services. If you want to add a new function to the software, modify the software according to the customer's requirements, give a reminder to the salesperson after the event is completed, and the SaaS mode will not work.

The rise of entrepreneurship in China has made China's economic development better and better. However, the rapid development has also led to the lack of a relatively fixed business model among Chinese enterprises.

Why is Salesforce worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Why can "American version nail" Slack be successfully listed? Why can the ToB industry in Europe, America and other developed countries compete with the ToC industry?

One important reason is that developed countries in Europe and the United States have adequate standards in business processes. Sufficient standard business processes can better help SaaS expand and apply in more enterprises. However, due to the rapid development and too many ways of Chinese enterprises, it is difficult to take the market for standardized products. It is often the enterprise that wants this demand and the enterprise that wants that demand. This directly leads to the loss of customers if SaaS manufacturers do not follow up on these needs. If we follow up the demand, we will become a traditional software customization provider, and we can't take advantage of the rapid replication of the SaaS system to achieve rapid expansion.

8、 Compare the deposit rate and the balance payment date

Most of the two parties have cooperated for the first time. In order to increase mutual trust and cooperation in later testing, foreign trade software developers usually require customers to pay part of the deposit after signing the contract, but each developer requires slightly different payment rates. Relatively speaking, the party with less deposit is more worthy of trust, Because a set of mature business management software has to go through two processes of "detail optimization" and "print template development" by software engineers, it is impossible to waste a lot of time on it for a small amount of deposit! The final payment date cannot be too early. Most software developers require to pay the final payment one week after the software is officially used. This cycle is too short. It doesn't matter if the reputation is very good and the post service is very good. Because the software details can only be found when multiple departments cooperate with each other to continuously enter several complete sets of business documents. Of course, enterprises should strengthen software testing when formally testing software to avoid unnecessary trouble later.