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Templates

Templates, not gated downloads

Everything here is published on the page it belongs to rather than behind an email form. A checklist you have to trade an address for is a lead magnet, and the trade tells you the content was built for us rather than for you.

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Nothing gatedNo email requiredUsable against any vendor
The templatesHow to use themWhy not gatedQuestions

Templates

Six templates, all on the page.

Each one works against any vendor, including us. Several of them will produce answers that argue against buying anything.

Requirements checklist

Structure, volume, process, data condition, and constraints — worked against your actual transactions rather than from memory. Unsettled requirements caused 31% of the stalls we have seen.

RFP question set

Twelve questions with verifiable answers, including the ones most vendors cannot answer: historical quote variance, what the AI does unapproved, and what blocks a release that scores worse.

Scenario demo brief

How to write three to five scenarios from your own transactions, what to send in advance, and what to watch for when a vendor hits the awkward one.

Reference call questions

What to ask, and specifically how to ask for two references whose projects overran. The reluctance to provide them is more informative than either call.

Scoring weights

Our published six-criterion weighting, with the opinions it encodes stated so you can adjust them. Fix your weights before any vendor is scored.

Contract terms checklist

The terms worth negotiating instead of rate — named team, discovery-failure allocation, data-condition contingency, phase gates with an exit, and knowledge transfer as a deliverable.

How to use them in order

  1. Establish the real problem before anything else. If the complaint is dimensional reporting or consolidation, that is a data problem and the cheapest fix is usually not a new ledger.
  2. Work the requirements checklist against your data, not from interviews. Two to three weeks with a hard stop.
  3. Fix your scoring weights and write them down. Weights set after the demos justify a preference that has already formed.
  4. Shortlist to three. Three is the number at which scenario demos are affordable and references can actually be called.
  5. Write scenarios from your own transactions and send them a week in advance. Include at least one genuinely awkward case.
  6. Take references, including the difficult ones, and note any refusal.
  7. Negotiate terms rather than rate. A phase gate with an exit is worth more than a few percent off a day rate.
Every template here will happily produce the answer that you should not buy anything. That is not a flaw in them.

Why nothing here is gated

A gated download is a trade: your contact details for a document. The trade is only worth making if the document is genuinely better than what is freely available, and in this category it almost never is — most gated ERP checklists are a page of generic prompts behind a form.

More to the point, gating changes what gets written. A document built to be traded for an address is optimised to look valuable at the moment of download rather than to be useful in week six. Publishing on the page removes that incentive entirely.

We would rather you used these against a competitor and found them useful than captured your address and sent you a sequence.

Where these come from

From engagements. The requirements checklist reflects what we find in data diagnostics across 74 companies. The RFP questions are the ones that separate responses in evaluations we have participated in. The contract terms are the ones we have watched protect customers, and the ones whose absence caused problems.

Where a template encodes an opinion — the scoring weights particularly — it is flagged, with the opinion stated so you can disagree with it deliberately.

Use them against us too

Ask us the twelve RFP questions. Ask for two references whose projects overran; we will provide them, including a migration where the reconciliation clock restarted twice. Score us on your own weights rather than ours. If these templates only worked in our favour they would not be worth publishing.

Questions

Common follow-ups.

Why is nothing gated?
Because gating changes what gets written — a document traded for an address is optimised to look valuable at download rather than to be useful in week six.
Can we use these to evaluate other vendors?
Yes, and we would prefer you did. If these only worked in our favour they would not be worth publishing.
Are there downloadable versions?
The content is on the pages, which is the format that stays current. If you want it in a document for a committee, copy it — no attribution required.
Where do the templates come from?
From engagements — 74 data diagnostics, 41 stalled implementations, and evaluations we have participated in. Where one encodes an opinion, it is flagged.
Will these tell us not to buy?
Frequently. About a third of our own health checks conclude no new software is needed, and the templates will reach that answer just as readily.

Use them against us.

Ask the twelve questions, demand the difficult references, and score us on your weights rather than ours.

Requirements checklistRFP question set