What to look for in an ERP demo

A scripted demo on tidy sample data looks good for every product. Send the vendor five of your items, one real BOM with two levels, one customer and one open order a few days before, and ask them to load those. A vendor who will not do this is telling you how support will feel later. In the demo, ask them to create a work order for your product, issue the material, log labour, close the job and show the cost, and watch whether the cost uses the real issue cost or a standard.

The daily reality of a small shop is corrections and exceptions, so ask for them explicitly.

• A stock count that disagrees with the system, and what the correction leaves behind
• A BOM revision change while an order is open
• Material issued to a job and part of it returned
• A job sent out for subcontracting and received back
• An inspection that fails, and how the NCR links to the job
• A user who may see prices but not change them

The tasks your team repeats all day matter more than features used once a quarter. Time how long it takes to receive a purchase order, issue material, print a job card, and log time against a step. Ask whether the floor can do its part on a phone or a shared terminal, with a barcode, and what happens when the internet drops. Then ask to drive the same tasks yourself, or hand the mouse to someone who has never used the system. A demo you cannot drive is a presentation.

Before the call ends, ask for three things in writing: the full price list including seats, storage and support; a link to the user guide and the changelog; and confirmation that you can export items, customers, vendors and transactions yourself at any time. Ask who answers support, in what hours, and how quickly a first reply arrives. A trial you can run with your own data for a few weeks tells you more than a second demo, so ask for one.