5 Reasons That Prolong A Construction Software Purchase Decision

By Sheldon Needle

Anyone who has been involved in selecting or selling construction accounting software knows the process can drag on for months, if not years , and be agonizingly painful. This is not a casual circumstance, but one built on some very specific issues which affect both the buyer and the seller.

When do companies start looking for new job cost and/or project management?
The answer is only when they have to! “Have to” situations include when an employee who is retiring currently supports their custom legacy system;r when the application software they own will no longer be supported by the vendor; or when their mediocre system costs thousands of dollars a year to maintain and is not being improved in any noticeable way.

Typically, new construction software candidates are looking for an integrated system that ties together estimating, job cost accounting, progress billing, purchasing and inventory control, and field data capture as well as project document management.

Five reasons for delay (and confusion):

Reason # 1 - Past Experience
Firstly, there is the approach-avoidance issue in purchasing new software. Nowadays, most managers have been through at least one and, possibly, severa software acquisitions and implementations. They have experienced all the trauma bringing new company-wide ERP software to the organization in terms of stretching its resources and staff patience to the breaking point and beyond.

These past traumas are lurking in their minds even when they know new software is needed by their current organization, so they inevitably vacillate back and forth with proceeding with the job cost accounting and project management software acquisition.

Reason # 2 - The Education Aspect
Successful managers often think that because they are really good at running a business, they are qualified enough to figure out the best software to buy. But buying software requires a very different set of skills and, if the project leader lacks this experience, they will usually be confused and frustrated when attempting to sort out software options.

The vendors then have to carry the weight of educating the buying prospect, which is a time consuming and tiresome exercise. So the educational aspect stretches out the buying cycle.

Reason # 3 - The Trust Factor
The prospect may not trust the salesperson. No matter what question he asks, he gets a canned answer, “yes the software can do that,” or “that can be done with a custom report,” or “oh, that’s just a matter of setup”. These seemingly innocuous comforting responses can lead to very nasty surprises.

A recent conversation with a large excavation contractor illustrates this point very well. The company uses crews extensively in its work and wants to report job cost by crew and not just by cost code and phase. He was told by the vendor reseller that the system could be set up to do that. Unfortunately, he failed to mention that this required using phase codes as the crew code and thus losing the ability to track job costs by phase, something just about all contractors want to do. (He is now looking for a new solution.)

Reason # 4 - Nice Guy/Gal Syndrome
Another reason for the ardous software selection cycle is what I call the “nice guy, gal,” syndrome. In this scenario the company people know that management is getting weak in the knees about going ahead with the project and, more likely than not, they will kill it. But because the vendor has spent so much time with them and is so invested in their purchasing the product, they don’t have the heart to tell them the truth, so they just keep leading them on with one excuse after another about why they aren’t quite ready to sign a contract.

Correspondingly, the software salesperson may delude himself into thinking that the project is still alive despite unstated messages to the contrary from the prospect.

Reason # 5 - Change in Terms and Promises
To stay in the competition and to keep the prospect in the sales pipeline, the vendor may make certain promises that they cannot deliver on. Common techniques are to provide unrealistically low verbal price ranges for their software so as not to scare off the prospect (or to meet competitors estimates). They may also may make promises about what the vendor is prepared to do to get their business in terms of custom software changes, writing custom reports, promises of new versions which have needed functionality and other verbal agreements.But, after all these promises, when the final contract quote comes in from the vendor, the script is completely rewritten and costs and deliverables are nothing like what was promised early on. Needless to say, everything stops dead in its tracks and, or possibly, the deal is terminated right then and there.

Summary
Most software vendors that have been in business for many years are reputable and deal with their prospects in a straightforward, ethical way. However, there are exceptions and buying prospects need to be alert to some of the traps they can run into. By the same token, prospective buyers also have an obligation to be truthful and direct in their communications and not lead vendors on. If both sides of the transaction can keep these things in mind, much could be done to alleviate the pain and confusion typically involved in purchasing new construction management software

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