Andrea Jones (speaker) explains Step 3 of an ERP system selection process: conduct vendor demos using real or realistic data. Key advice: do homework first (define critical requirements and pre-screen vendors), limit and target demos to save time, record demo sessions to align expectations and verify vendor claims, and run multiple, role-specific demos with consistent follow-up questions for apples-to-apples comparisons.
Hi, I'm Andrea Jones and today we're going to talk about the third step in our system selection process. People often think this is the first step. It is to conduct demos with real data. The reason people think it's the first step is they're like, yeah, how do we even get started unless we see some of these systems? We just want to call up a bunch of vendors, schedule some demos, they'll show it to us. If you've been watching the series though, you know that you should have figured out your critical requirements list first and really understand what systems could fit that before you waste everybody's time sitting around in demos. And you know, to be fair, it's your team who is going to be spending and evaluating this. You don't want to sit in 50 demos, you want to sit in a few. Your people's time is worth a lot and you probably have high level people on this selection process and their time's worth quite a bit. Also from the vendor side, I'm a service provider too. Nobody wants to waste their time if you have no intention of moving forward. So they're happier if you don't contact them unless you are truly interested in their software. So please do them the favor of doing your homework up front so you don't waste their time either. Okay, getting off my soapbox here. When you conduct the demos, see if you can get some of your own data in there. Some customer or, excuse me, system vendors won't want to use your data. That means they have to upload it. They, you might expect it to be looking really perfect. But you know, if you're in like manufacturing, you might want to see the names of some real customers or at least something that sounds very similar and maybe some real suppliers or some of your real products so that when your team sees it, it just feels a little bit more natural. So hopefully you'll be able to do that. The other thing is know what you want to ask them. So again, you have this critical list of requirements you need to see in action, especially some of the things that this system says it can do, which is the reason you're talking to them, like have them show you that, you know, maybe it's some sort of automatic follow up process on your invoicing schedule, for example. I mean, how does that work? Can you see that? Or it's some sort of forecast in your procurement model. Can you see how that works? Or it's, you know, something from the CRM that automatically gets populated into a sales order when the customer converts can they show you some of these things? So I would suggest, knowing what you are going to ask, don't go in it blind. That's going to waste people's time even more. And then record the conversations. So here's a specific example where we recorded a sales conversation and asked the vendor if they were able to do it was something with routing for GPS routing for trucks that were going to different places. And the vendor said that, yes, they were, and they showed us a bit of a demo. But it turned out that that was in a. What's the word? It was in a test environment and it hadn't gone live by the time we needed it because they were behind. But we could point back to the recording like, hey, you showed us this and you told us this would be available to us. So it was a very different conversation about what the expectations were than if we hadn't been able to go back and point out that at minute eight in this particular conversation, we were told this was possible. Okay, I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus. I'm just very big on aligning expectations and being transparent. Okay, so there's that. The other thing is, of course there's going to be questions that come up in the second meeting that didn't come up in the first. So you need to make sure that you record the conversation, but go back and ask everybody so that you have the same answer so that later you can compare apples to apples. All right, so again, do your homework. Only talk to the vendors that will actually meet your critical requirement needs. Save everybody the time, know what questions you're going to ask, record the conversations, go back and ask the same questions of everybody so that you can do the apples to apples comparison. You will most likely do multiple demos. It's not going to be one overview. When you're done, you. The accounting team is going to want to see the accounting module. The shipping and warehouse team is going to want to see the warehouse module. You know, all of that. So expect a few rounds of all of this and be prepared to make sure that everybody's on the same page with respect to the final output and all of the answers that you've gotten by the end of these demos, hopefully using some of your own data. All right, good luck with those demos. Have fun.
