The profession “consultant”, to which I belong, sometimes feels suspected of a cliché, especially to use so-called “buzzwords” or even to coin them in the first place. However, I don’t know exactly who created the term “real time”, which is by the way even defined in a German industry standard. If you browse through the past, you may get the impression that IT providers, customers and consultants have been hunting for real time in reporting together, especially since the 1970s.   But why is the term “real-time” still so omnipresent as an objective of projects and new products? After all, it implies quite logically that real time has not yet been implemented in many places in the various reports.   There are, of course, good reasons why many reporting solutions, especially in complex organizations, still do not provide up-to-date data “always at the push of a button” (to give the term “real-time” a pragmatic, experimental description). M&A activities, for example, bring new data sources, structures and characteristics, new systems and “differently designed processes” into the companies and would first have to be integrated and harmonized for a then group-wide “truly real real-time reporting”. In the case of ERP systems, this

Software Selection Decisions Software selection decisions are not literally “regular” for managers and their employees in supporting functional areas, but they certainly occur from time to time. For example, a self-made IT solution should be transformed into a solid standard. Or paperwork produced with office solutions on a “network drive” is to be abolished. Newly created management and technical concepts should be automated and, above all, implemented “digitally”. Or the “actually good” solution introduced many years ago, which more or less covers current requirements, is no longer being developed or maintained by your manufacturer – a situation that is unacceptable, especially for important business processes. Let’s stay with decisions on business processes that are critical for success, such as solutions for the management of online shops, for personnel management or corporate control. In order to be able to make the “right” decision for the automation of such processes, a mature set of methodical instruments should be available in-house or on the market. In fact, numerous standard software selection processes can be researched without any problems, which as a rule are at least not dissimilar to the one shown here as an example:   To the textbook-like software selection process: In