Requirements that mean something
Derived from your actual transactions and processes rather than assembled from a template. A requirements list nobody can trace to a real workflow is where selection projects go wrong.
Services
We sell an ERP and we also sell advice about buying one, which is an obvious conflict. The way we handle it is to be paid for the advice, to take no referral fees from anybody, and to write down when the right answer is a competitor.
Tell us what you are considering and why you started looking. We will tell you if we can help.
The situation
A defensible decision with the reasoning documented, rather than a shortlist assembled from whoever demoed best.
Derived from your actual transactions and processes rather than assembled from a template. A requirements list nobody can trace to a real workflow is where selection projects go wrong.
What matters most, agreed and written down before any vendor is scored — because weights set after the demos are weights chosen to justify a preference.
Three products, not ten, with the reasons the others were excluded documented. Including us, or excluding us, on the same criteria.
Your data, your workflows, your edge cases. A standard demo tests the vendor’s ability to demo; a scenario demo tests the product.
Licence, implementation, integration, and internal time. The last one is usually the largest and is almost never in a vendor proposal.
Where each candidate would struggle with your specific business, including ours. A selection report with no downside on the recommended option is not a report.
You should be sceptical of an ERP vendor offering selection advice. The standard version of this in the industry is worse than it looks: most independent selection consultancies take referral fees from the vendors they recommend, which is a conflict with no disclosure at all.
We take none, from anybody, ever. The engagement is priced to be worth doing on its own — $12,000 over four weeks — and if the conclusion is NetSuite or Intacct or keeping what you have, that is what the report says.
Nearly a third of the stalled implementations we are brought into failed because requirements never settled. Not because the software could not do it — that is the rarest cause by some distance — but because scope kept moving as people discovered what they had not specified.
So the first two weeks are spent deriving requirements from transactions rather than from interviews alone. What people say they need and what their data shows they do diverge more than anyone expects, and the divergence is where the surprises live.
A vendor demo is a rehearsed path through a clean dataset. It tells you nothing about how the product handles your intercompany elimination, your revenue allocation, or the customer who pays eleven invoices with one short wire.
We write the scenarios from your real transactions, send them to every candidate in advance, and attend the demos. The vendors who prepare properly and the ones who deflect become obvious within twenty minutes, and that itself is informative about the implementation ahead.
Vendor-supplied references are selected. We ask for two customers who left, and we call them. Some vendors refuse, which is an answer. Those who provide them are usually the ones worth shortlisting, and the conversations are more useful than any number of happy customers.
A meaningful share of these engagements conclude that the existing system is adequate and the real problem is a process, a data quality issue, or one missing integration. That is a legitimate outcome and it saves considerably more than the fee.
Where to start
Transactions analysed, processes mapped, requirements derived and weighted with your team. The weights are agreed before any vendor is scored.
Market scanned against your weighted requirements, three candidates selected, exclusions documented. We are scored on the same sheet as everyone else.
Scenarios written from your data, sent in advance, demos attended and scored live against the agreed weights rather than from memory afterwards.
Scored comparison, three-year total cost including internal time, named risks per candidate, and a recommendation with its reasoning.
Questions
Tell us what you are evaluating. We will tell you honestly whether we can advise without a conflict.