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The choice of potential suppliers, within the United Kingdom, is vast. Every market niche has a number of suppliers and, overall, there are, at least, 10,000 suppliers, and, despite consolidation of companies, scores of different accounting packages, and of manufacturing packages available. There are a number of ways of choosing potential suppliers, including:

– personal knowledge and contacts;

– recommendations from other companies in the same market sector;

– check with specialist magazines and suitable journals. They usually publish surveys and, may, produce specialised directories;

– visit specialist trade shows and exhibitions;

– go to your nearest decent reference library and look in the various software directories for suppliers of systems similar to your needs. The biggest of these lists around 2,000 packages, split across a wide variety of applications. These directories are usually 6 months out of date when published and, while usually re-published annually, are often used far longer than that;

– ask computer software suppliers who their preferred dealer is for that particular market sector;

– persuade a friendly computer or management consultant to point you to the organisations that specialise in maintaining an index of software applications, and suppliers.

In future editions of this web-site, we hope to provide links to a variety of information sources, but we need to compile the list and obtain agreement from the organisations involved.

From these sources, a list of a dozen potential suppliers should be identified. If more are identified, a preliminary elimination stage will be required in the tendering process. For details, see the Tendering Process.