Six questions to ask an ERP vendor that they would rather you did not

An ERP demo is a performance, and a good salesperson has given it four hundred times. Nothing you see in one is false, exactly. It is just curated — the data is clean, the workflow is the happy path, and the screens shown are the ones that photograph well.

These six questions cut across the performance. We have put our own answers under each one, including the places where the answer is uncomfortable, because a list of questions a vendor cannot answer is only useful if the vendor publishing it answers them first.

1. “Show me my bill of materials, on your screen, today.”

Not a slide of somebody else’s. Your product, your levels, your alternates, your wastage. Bring a part number and a routing with fifteen operations and ask them to put it in during the meeting.

The reason this works: an ERP that was written for distribution and had manufacturing added later can show you a BOM, but it will be two levels deep and it will not know what a process loss is. Fifteen operations with stage-wise WIP is where the difference shows.

Our answer: ask us for a demo and we will walk you through it on your own trade. It carries real multi-level BOMs with alternates and wastage norms in 37 industry templates. If your industry is one where we have authored the data rather than themed it, you will see real process flows rather than plausible-looking ones — and if it is not, ask, and we will tell you which you are looking at.

2. “What does this cost me in year three?”

Not the licence. The total: users at the rate they will be by then, a second plant, the add-ons that turned out not to be included, support at the tier you actually need, per-document charges on e-invoicing and messaging, and the annual increase.

Ask specifically what happens when you add the 26th user, and what a second plant costs. Those two numbers are where a cheap-looking quote becomes an expensive one, and they are rarely on the first page.

Our answer: every price is published, including what a user and a plant cost above the plan’s limit, and all 46 add-ons are listed with the price model against each. Where a cost is a third party’s — Meta’s per-message charge, your e-invoicing provider’s per-document rate, bank API charges — those run on accounts in your name and those providers bill you directly. We do not mark them up, and we also cannot quote them, because they are not ours to quote.

3. “Who does the implementation, and what is their name?”

Sales and delivery are frequently different companies. Ask whether the implementation is done by the vendor or by a partner, how many days are budgeted, who specifically will be on your site, and what happens when that person leaves mid-project.

Then ask what “go live” means in the contract. If it means the software is installed, you have bought an installation. If it means your numbers reconcile against your old method for a period, you have bought an implementation.

Our answer: how it works sets out the four stages. We go live one line at a time, in parallel with whatever you use now, and cut over when both sides agree for a full week — which means the first module is running while the rest is still being configured, rather than everything landing on one Monday.

4. “Can I get all of my data out, myself, today?”

Not “can we export a report”. All of it — masters, transactions, attachments, the audit trail — in a format something else can read, obtained without raising a support ticket and without a notice period.

The answer tells you what the renewal conversation will be like in three years. A vendor whose data is easy to leave with has to keep you by being good.

Our answer: every report exports to CSV or XLSX from inside the product, and a full database export is yours on request at any time, including after you leave. No exit fee, no hostage period. That is stated on the security page and in the refund and cancellation policy, so it is a commitment rather than a reassurance.

5. “What happens on the shop floor when the internet drops?”

Ask it about the shop floor specifically, not the office. A supervisor cannot stop recording production because a leased line is down, and “it’s cloud, it’s always available” is an answer about the vendor’s uptime, not about your connectivity.

The follow-up matters more than the answer: when the network comes back, what happens to the entries made in the meantime? Queued and synced is a design. Re-typed from a paper log is not.

Our answer: floor entries queue offline and sync when the network returns. Ask us to demonstrate it rather than taking the sentence — that is the right way to treat this claim from any vendor, us included.

6. “Which of the things you just showed me are live with a paying customer?”

The single most useful question on this list, and the one most likely to change the temperature of the room. Every product demo mixes shipped features with near-term roadmap, and the mixing is rarely deliberate deception — it is enthusiasm. But you are buying the shipped half.

Ask for it feature by feature on the ones you care about. Then ask for a reference customer in your sector, at roughly your size, that you can call without the salesperson on the line.

Our answer, and this is the uncomfortable one: MANUPRIME is a young product from an established company, and we do not have a wall of logos to show you. We would rather say that than borrow somebody else’s. What we will do is tell you plainly, feature by feature, what is shipped and what is planned — ask, and you will get a straight list, not a slide. When we have a customer willing to be a reference, they will appear on this site by name, with numbers they agreed to. Until then, there is nothing there, which is what an empty proof section on a website should mean.

The meta-question

If a vendor gets defensive at any of the six, that is the finding. None of these is a trick question. They are all questions a confident product answers in a sentence, and the only cost of asking them is a slightly awkward twenty minutes now instead of a very expensive year later.

If you want to put them to us, request a demo and start with question one.