The Management Team section should also include biographies of company's Advisory Board and/or Board of Directors. While having well-known advisors/board members adds credibility to business plan, it is highly effective to explain how these advisors will directly impact company through strategic advice and/or providing conduits to key clients, partners, suppliers, etc.

In summary, Management Team section of business plan is an opportunity to prove to investors that your company has necessary talent to succeed. Rather than waste this opportunity by merely showing employee resumes, which could be included in Appendix, section should be used to explain precisely how team is uniquely qualified to execute venture in its present state.

Furthermore, do you have budget to pull off an in-house project? What are opportunity costs? What is your company's track record of getting IT projects completed on-time and on-budget?

3. Project risk. One major reason that organizations build in-house is that they want to build expertise in an emerging technology. Does this meet your organization's business goals? What if you find that learning curve is long and steeper than you anticipated? Are you willing to take that risk? When you are scoping your project, have you considered all of issues? Are you willing to stick to your original scope when your users demand new features (scope creep)?

If you cannot mitigate these issues, then you should strongly consider a fixed price, packaged solution.

2. Process understanding. Collaborative inventory management(VMI) processes are complex and varied as your trading partner needs. If you have many diverse trading partners (or may have in future), building your own solution may not be a great idea (see "long term maintenance" above). Additionally, your trading partners may want to extend use of collaboration solution to their trading partners. Can they do this? Only if you are willing to get into solution environment. This is especially important as your trading partners start to get more and more benefit from these solutions and may force you to switch to another solution.

1. Third-party objectivity. A critical concern for trading partners is that of data confidentiality and security. Most trading partners are leery of exchanging critical and confidential and feel more comfortable with a third party managing data. Is this a critical issue for your organization?

Summary In nascent days of any technology, be it car or software, many companies think that they can build better mousetrap. However, as technology evolves and becomes more complete, there are significant barriers to entry. As collaborative inventory management field continues to evolve, there are enough reasons to give pause before deciding to build a solution in-house.