CSC's Accelerated Package Review, Evaluation and Selection Service, known as XPRESS, brings speed to business results. Traditional packages evaluations and selections (PES) take from 4-6 months because they spend time gathering detailed functional requirements; developing/issuing/verifying detailed vendor RFP's; and only consider strategic drivers at end of process, when team may be exhausted. The XPRESS approach accomplishes the PES in 1-3 months.

The XPRESS approach accomplishes the PES in 1-3 months by:

• Driving the Selection from Strategy - Understand business and IT strategies from the start to drive the selection process.
• Targeting the Critical - Focus the selection on those capabilities that support the strategy and critical business success factors
• Leading with Vision - Use senior, cross-functional client and CSC teams
• Leveraging Knowledge - Leverage CSC solution experts and best-in-class selection tool

XPRESS has been successfully employed in the Consumer Goods, High Tech, Financial Services, Utilities, Healthcare, Chemicals, Publishing and Educational Testing industries and well as the Government sector to evaluate & select Financial, HR/Payroll, Operations/Distribution, CRM and BI applications.

The XPRESS methodology, unlike traditional PES projects, makes use of Gartner's Decision Engine (DE) Tool for selections of ERP, Finance, HR/Payroll, Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications. Since the tool doesn't cover all vendors and other specialized applications, we also use other sources of information, e.g. professional society evaluations, Gartner Research, etc.

Another differentiating tool that the XPRESS methodology utilizes is tightly scripted vendor demonstrations. The scripts used for the vendor demos:

• Reduce the reliance on the vendor's sales presentations for information
• Focus on the critical processes as designated by the team
• Provide a consistent framework to evaluate vendors
• Enable the client to view the application using their data for their critical processes
• Afford the team the opportunity to see what processes might be improved which is helpful in estimating the implementation effort.

By following the XPRESS approach, we are able to achieve:

• Better alignment with business and IT strategies
• Faster decision-making that maintains momentum and organizational energy for implementation
• More compelling case for action that propels the implementation and realization of benefits

For more information please contact:

Brad Barton
CSC Supply Chain Practice Leader
Phone (314) 692-3700
bbarton@csc.com