FP&A / EPM software selection is difficult, time-consuming and risky. If your organisation has recently ran a software evaluation process in the FP&A / EPM space you have likely experienced the pain: endless vendors to choose from, countless hours invested from your team on discovery calls, demos, sales-rep “check-ins”, follow-up demos, scoping calls, custom demos, webinars, that whole RFP process (seriously does anyone read them?), proof-of-concepts, fighting tooth and nail to get some sort of clarity on pricing, internal meetings, vendor reviews, analyst calls to try to get some “neutral third-party” input and finally price negotiation and contract red-lining but only after getting internal approval for the third time. 

Yeah, software selection is difficult, time-consuming and risky.

Full disclosure: I was on the other side of the conference table from you for over a decade, working in sales, pre-sales, GTM strategy and solutions consulting for a vendor in the industry. For the most part, my job was to make the product look as easy as possible, to avoid any landmines and to steer your thought process and decision criteria in certain directions. My goals and incentives often did not align with yours. I’ve participated in over 1,000 software selection processes, and I’m taking the good, the bad and the ugly of what I’ve seen and trying to turn it into useful information for software evaluation teams. My goal is to walk through what I think is an optimal approach to mitigating risk, driving real value, and landing on a defensible decision that your organisation can feel confident in. 

Here’s how I would run a software selection process.

Phase 1: The Why

Why does your organisation need to get out of MS Excel or replace its current legacy tool? 

The answer is obvious to many: we need more ownership from the business, faster forecasting, better reporting, AI, etc. Maybe you might think the why is buried in the middle of a feature/requirement list, including items like driver-based planning, what-if modelling or strong integrations to your source systems. Although those are perfectly reasonable wants/needs, they aren’t the real “why?”. The true reason is return on investment. ROI needs to be defined early and treated as your north star throughout the selection journey. Without a clear picture of the value your organisation will realise from a new tool, your software selection process will spiral into a feature/function comparison and an “gut feeling” decision. Value can be difficult to quantify and is often tied to today’s pain. 

My one recommendation on the real “why” is to focus on the bottlenecks today, the pain they cause and what happens if they are fixed. What is tomorrow’s pain? String together a few cascading problem–fix–problem sequences, and you start to get to your real “why”.

Phase 2: The Who 

Engaging with more than 3-4 vendors during a software evaluation process is the easiest way to ensure your team is burned out before the implementation even starts. So how do you go from 40+ vendors to the top 10%? Some organisations narrow their list based on familiarity, prior experience, brand-name recognition or “leader” status in analyst reports. That approach can work, but it does not take into account the specifics of your current team and organisation. Industry, size, geographic location, internal skill sets, internal support/maintenance availability, IT landscape, data sources, and project scope are all inputs into identifying the optimal shortlist of software vendors for your organisation. By layering in the nuances of your business and your team into your shortlisting process, you will soon find yourself segmenting a long list of software vendors into different clusters:

• Excel-native tools with very quick TTV but a short runway on future enhancements
• Strong modelling tools with great depth, but require COE or heavy consulting dollars to expand future use cases
• Modern AI-native tools that are less “proven” than Gen-2 cloud players
• Full platform solutions with more financial rigour but less flexibility

Identifying those 3-4 vendors worthy of your team’s valuable time is not an easy task but when done correctly it opens the door to proper vendor-level due diligence.

Phase 3: The How

How do we engage with our shortlist of software vendors? 

At this stage, your organisation is going to quickly become a QSO (qualified sales opportunity) for the 3-4 vendors you have shortlisted. That means your organisation will officially enter their sales process, methodology and internal reporting. If you don’t have a crisp sequence of events to conduct your due diligence, you’ll likely be persuaded to follow their process and not your own. 

This might be a hot take, but I strongly encourage software evaluation teams to skip generic, high-level introductory demos. Most viable software vendors have tons of on-demand webinars and videos that scratch the “just want to see the look & feel” itch. I advise engaging with vendors once you’ve identified clear use cases you’d like to see in a demo, with your data and under real-life simulations. Vendors love to show off their products with perfect data, polished workflows and under “safe conditions”. 

Although it’s nice to see a product in an optimal state of use, the best way to determine whether a product is a strong fit for your organisation is to stress-test it. These use cases are not a “gotcha” to try to make the vendor look bad.

On the contrary, they are designed to be a true litmus test on the effort, skills and clicks it takes to be successful with the product in more realistic conditions. By weaving in more specific, use-case-oriented demos with clear success criteria, your team will be better able to identify which tools they can succeed with. 

Phase 4: The When

At this stage in your process, you’ve likely learned that most tools can tackle the majority of your immediate needs. Many can tackle future requirements, albeit with different levels of effort, native capabilities, and future roadmap items. 

Before finalising your vendor of choice, I would encourage you to deeply evaluate the often-overlooked component of a digital transformation: the when. The “when?” helps us break down long implementation efforts into bite-sized chunks and slowly assemble them into a real project plan. 

Phasing a project has a strong track record of mitigating risk, reducing implementation costs, and increasing the likelihood of user adoption. Behind any project plan is a team of people from your organisation, the vendor and any third-party SI. 

Make your software due diligence process multi-dimensional and evaluate the people/the plan with scrutiny. It’s ok to ask for specific names of resources, specific project experience and even “interview” the implementation teams and stress-test their plan for your implementation. Map the people to the project plan phases and ensure they align with your envisioned roll-out. You wouldn’t hire someone on your FP&A team without vetting them, so why would you take a different approach for your digital transformation?

Summary

Choosing the right FP&A/EPM tool is hard. I’ve seen many organisations run loosely managed evaluation processes. Sometimes it works out, but often it leads to failed implementations, overrun budgets, and more Excel spreadsheets. I believe there is a “right” vendor for every organisation - if you can say “yes” to the points below, chances are you have found yours.

Value clarity:

We have explicitly defined what “value” means for our organisation and we can explain how this tool is expected to deliver that value within the first year.

Shortlist discipline:

We deliberately limited our evaluation to a cluster of vendors that fit our size, complexity, scope, and internal resources, rather than defaulting to market leaders or analyst favourites.

Workflow fit, not demo hype:

We tested each shortlisted tool against realistic FP&A use cases, messy data and real planning scenarios. We understand the practical effort, skills and ownership model required to scale with our selected tool.

Implementation realism:

We have a clear implementation approach, validated that it fits both our organisation and the selected vendor and pressure-tested the proposed plan with named delivery resources.

Explicit trade-offs:

We can clearly articulate what we are optimising for and what we are knowingly giving up, with documentation to prove our thought process.