General

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

1. Choose the standard version, or choose secondary development on the basis of the standard version?

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

According to my experience in foreign trade software development for many years, it is very rare that the standard version is completely suitable for enterprises. There are many reasons, which will be introduced in detail later. Development, now the market is boasting about the SaaS (software as a service) platform, but I am here to tell you, do not choose the SaaS platform for business management software, the biggest disadvantage of the SaaS platform is the lack of personalized needs, the software is too rigid, The secondary development costs are extremely 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, email management, etc. Before purchasing software, it is necessary to distinguish their main business directions. This can be learned directly from their official website. Taking our company's 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 corporate websites introduces a lot of customer relationship management, customer discovery, and email management, it means that they focus on customer relationship, and business management may be developed incidentally. In this way, the business management software may be very simple and cannot achieve the ideal management effect.

At present, Shiyang develops a lot of customer relationship management (CRM), and the company is relatively large, because the customer relationship management system is standardized and has a single function.

3. Don’t blindly believe in Internet search rankings

The search ranking has no practical significance. Most of them spend money to attract traffic and advertise. People are more likely to read a few more pages.

4. Post-service

This is very important. Post-service is the basic guarantee for providing software. Generally, software developers will give one year of service as a gift, and after one year, it will be a paid service. The specific service fee varies from company to company, and most of them are calculated based on the ratio of software sales.

Five, telephone communication, listen to the professionalism of foreign trade knowledge

Now that the Internet is so developed, it is not necessary to have a local developer to find foreign trade software. Relatively speaking, it is more important to find a professional foreign trade developer than a local one.

6. Data Security

Carefully identify before cooperation. After cooperating with a software developer, don’t worry that the developer will steal your data. If you are worried, don’t cooperate. Software and networks are everywhere. If the developer intends to steal your business data, whether it is a stand-alone version or an online version As long as you open the software under the network environment, you can steal it. Therefore, carefully identify before cooperation, and trust software developers unconditionally after cooperation!

7. Should you choose the traditional ERP model or the SaaS model?

Some people say that the rise of SaaS (software as a service) is a revolution in the IT industry, because its appearance 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. Combining traditional ERP with popular cloud computing is a big innovation in itself. Therefore, we can find out several points that SaaS is stronger than traditional ERP through cloud computing:

1 Low barriers to implementation: In the traditional model, many enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, are often discouraged by the high one-time payment threshold for software, and it is difficult for customers to manage and maintain the software themselves under the traditional software model. However, SaaS only needs to pay according to demand, so that customers can focus more on their core business.

2. Large market space: SaaS speeds up product updates and can be used anytime, anywhere.

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

Compared with the traditional model, SaaS has so many advantages, but it has a fatal weakness for enterprise management software, that is, there is no way to provide enterprise-specific services. For example, if you want to add a new function to the software, modify the software according to customer requirements, or give a reminder to the salesman after the event is completed, the SaaS model will not work.

The rise of China's entrepreneurial trend has made China's economic development better and better. However, too fast development has also led to the lack of a relatively fixed business model among Chinese companies.

Why is Salesforce worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Why was the "US version of DingTalk" Slack successfully listed? Why can the ToB industry in developed countries such as Europe and the United States compete with the ToC industry?

One very important reason is that developed countries in Europe and the United States have sufficient standards in business processes. Sufficient standard business processes can better help SaaS expand and apply in more enterprises. However, due to the rapid development of Chinese enterprises, there are too many channels, and it is difficult for standardized products to occupy the market. It is often that this company wants this demand, and that company wants that demand. This directly leads to the loss of customers if SaaS vendors do not follow up on these demands. If you follow up the demand, you will become a traditional software customizer, and you will not be able to take advantage of the rapid replication of the SaaS system to achieve rapid expansion.

8. Comparison from the ratio of deposit and payment date of final payment

Most of the two parties are cooperating for the first time. In order to increase mutual trust and post-test cooperation, foreign trade software developers usually require customers to pay part of the deposit after signing the contract, but each developer requires a slightly different payment rate, which is relatively The party with the smaller deposit is more trustworthy, because a set of mature business management software has to go through two processes of "detail optimization" and "printing template development" by software engineers, and it is impossible to waste a lot of time for a small deposit Get on it! The final payment date should not be too early. Most software developers require payment of the final payment one week after the software is officially used. This cycle is too short. If the word of mouth is very good and the post-service is very good, it doesn't matter. Because the software details can only be discovered by multiple departments cooperating with continuous input of several complete sets of business documents. Of course, enterprises should strengthen software testing during formal software testing, so as to avoid unnecessary troubles later.