Choose your vendor on facts, not on the best demo

Your accounting package is reaching its limits, your planning system is no longer maintained, or you finally want one system instead of three separate tools. Vendors come by, all give a polished demo, and all quote a different amount. After the third presentation, you mainly know what each vendor does well, and still not which one fits your work. This is the moment when companies make a choice they still feel five years later.

Why the demo sends you the wrong way

A demo shows what the vendor wants to show. The screens are filled with tidy sample data. The exceptions your admin staff run into every week are not in it. And the question of how you leave with your own data in three years never comes up. The price on the quote also says little. Per-user licenses, implementation hours, integrations with your current systems, and the extra work that appears in month four rarely sit side by side on one page.

The result is predictable. You pick the package that looked best, find out during implementation what it cannot do, and pay for custom work to close the gap. We reverse the order: first decide what the system must do for you, then see who can deliver that.

Requirements first, then vendors

We start on the work floor, not in the boardroom. We sit for a morning next to the people who enter orders, make schedules, or keep files, and write down what really happens: which steps, which exceptions, which lists kept outside the system. From that comes a requirements list in plain language, not a sixty-page technical specification. Each requirement gets a weight: must, optional, or only nice to have. That weighting is the most important document of the whole project, because it decides later who wins and why.

For organizations with a duty to tender, such as municipalities, schools, and healthcare providers, we turn this list into the technical part of the tender documents and the award criteria. For a small or mid-sized company, we send the same list as a request to a shortlist of three to five parties that fit your size and sector. A wholesaler with forty employees gets nothing from a package built for a large corporation, and the reverse is true too.

Comparing like with like

Every vendor gets the same questions, the same sample data, and the same task for the demo. Not their standard presentation, but your own scenario: this order, this exception, this integration with Exact or AFAS (two accounting and ERP packages common in the Netherlands). We attend those sessions and notice what is not said. Everything goes into one comparison matrix, with the weighted requirements on one axis and the vendors on the other. That way you can defend the outcome to your fellow directors, your supervisory board, or your accountant.

We calculate the price over five years, not over the first year. Licenses, implementation, integrations, training, maintenance, and the cost of leaving all count. Sometimes the cheapest package turns out to be the most expensive choice. Sometimes your current system, with a good integration, can last for years. If the honest conclusion is that you do not need to buy anything, that is what the recommendation says.

The contract: ownership, exit, and real costs

The choice is only finished when the contract is right. We go through the points that matter later. Who owns the data? In what format do you get it back if you leave? Where is it stored, and does it stay in the EU? What happens to the price after the first year, and what is the notice period? For an implementation, we record what is delivered when, and what happens if that fails. This is not legal advice. These are the technical and practical questions a lawyer usually does not ask.

After that, we stay available if you want us to. While the implementation runs, our fractional CTO can sit alongside one day a week to keep the vendor on their toes. If you first want to know where your whole IT landscape should go before you replace one package, the project starts with an IT strategy and roadmap, and the selection follows from it. Everything starts with a free intake, where we check whether a selection project fits your situation.