Lab & Pilot Programs Lab Program The Lab evaluation is critical to the overall success of the project. As such, it represents the greatest single opportunity to create friction or overall failure. The entire process up until this point is designed to provide the committee sufficient information, from initial interviews of the functional business units, through the actual RFP submission and subsequent product demonstrations, all the way to the selection of the final vendor, to create the “success criteria.” These criteria should be prioritized and transparently evaluated through the Lab phase of the project.
SUCCESS CRITERIA
UNIFORMITY
Mutually agree with selected vendor(s) on the success criteria and sign off. Success criteria should be weighed/prioritized, since no single system/solution will ever accomplish everything for everyone.
Arrange a heavily scripted, uniform process for internal demos to judge success against prioritized requirements.
SCORING LAB ACCURACY Lab should fully represent the most common environment/ecosystem, representative of the actual live Pilot to follow. This includes an accurate number of POS terminals, printers, KDS, OCBs, payment terminals, etc., all connected to the same network (and appliances) as the Pilot location, with functional integration partners integrated and sharing data.
After evaluating, apply predetermined weighting to criteria in order to create a scorecard for stakeholders to validate/ choose a final solution to enter Pilot.
NOTE: There is always some portion of the Lab that cannot fully replicate the solution, until the ecosystem is recreated in a full production environment; however, as much testing as possible should be done in this demo/test environment.
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BUYER’S GUIDE & RFP BEST PRACTICES: POINT OF SALE
