Vendor demos are designed. The sequence, the sample data, the order in which features appear — all of it is built to show the product at its best, and every vendor does this because every vendor would be foolish not to.
The way to get past a designed demo is to arrive with your own questions and ask them in your own order. Below are 42, grouped by area. They are not weighted equally and they are not all relevant to every manufacturer — a job shop can skip most of the traceability section, a food producer cannot skip any of it.
Two rules for using them:
Ask for demonstration, not description. “Yes, we support that” is not an answer to any question on this list. “Let me show you” is. Where a question can be answered by watching someone click, insist on watching.
Write down the answers during the call. Three vendors into a selection process, the demos blur. The scoring spreadsheet exists for this reason.
Item master and BOM data
1. How many BOM levels can a single product have, and is there a practical limit before performance degrades?
2. Show me a cost roll-up: change the price of a purchased component three levels down and show the finished good’s standard cost updating.
3. Can I create a phantom or transient assembly that is consumed without becoming a stock item?
4. Show me a where-used query — which finished goods contain this component.
5. How are BOM revisions handled? Can two revisions be active at once with different effectivity dates?
6. Can a BOM include non-material lines — outsourced operations, subcontract services, tooling amortisation?
What a bad answer sounds like on this section: revisions handled by duplicating the item and appending “-v2” to the code. That works until you have 400 items and nobody knows which is current.
Production, routing and scheduling
7. Show me a routing with multiple operations, each on a different work centre, with setup and run times.
8. How does the system calculate a promised date — material availability only, or capacity as well?
9. Is scheduling finite or infinite? If finite, what happens when a work centre is overloaded?
10. Show me a work centre load report: committed hours against available hours, by week.
11. How does the shop floor report progress — what does the operator actually touch, and what happens if they forget?
12. Can a work order be partially completed, and does partial completion release the finished quantity to stock immediately?
A bad answer here is a scheduling module that only works if every operation is confirmed in real time, paired with no realistic way for operators to confirm them.
Inventory and warehouse
13. Show me stock by location, and show me availability calculated per location rather than in aggregate.
14. How are transfers between locations handled — as a document with in-transit status, or as two separate adjustments?
15. What reorder logic is available: reorder point, min/max, MRP net requirements, forecast-driven? Can different items use different rules?
16. Show me a stock allocation being reserved against a specific sales order, and show me what happens when a higher-priority order arrives.
17. What does the mobile or scanning experience look like, and what hardware does it require?
18. How are cycle counts run and posted, and does the system suggest what to count?
Traceability and compliance
19. Run a genealogy report: from a raw material lot forward to every customer order that received product made from it.
20. Now run it backwards: from a serial number to every input lot.
21. Are lot and serial numbers enforced at transaction level, or captured as free text on a document?
22. How are expiry dates handled — blocked from allocation, warned, or ignored?
23. Can I export a full audit trail of who changed what and when, in a format an auditor will accept?
Question 21 separates real traceability from the appearance of it more reliably than any other question on this list.
Purchasing and suppliers
24. Can one item have several approved suppliers with different prices, lead times and minimum order quantities?
25. Does the system support tiered or quantity-break pricing per supplier?
26. Show me a purchase suggestion generated from actual demand — sales orders, work orders, reorder points — rather than from a static list.
27. How are partial deliveries, over-deliveries and supplier returns handled?
Costing and finance
28. Which costing methods are supported — standard, average, FIFO, actual — and can they differ by item?
29. How is labour costed into a work order: standard rate, actual reported time, or not at all?
30. How is overhead applied — per hour, per unit, per work centre, as a percentage?
31. Show me landed cost being allocated across a shipment by value, weight or volume.
32. Show me gross margin for a single completed work order, and tell me which fields have to be populated for that number to be real.
Integrations, data and customisation
33. Is there a documented REST API? Send me the documentation URL now, before the next call.
34. Are there webhooks, or is integration poll-based? What is the minimum polling interval?
35. What are the API rate limits, and what happens when they are exceeded?
36. Is there a sandbox or test company separate from live data?
37. Can I add a custom field, a validation rule or an automated notification myself, without a developer and without a change request?
Question 33 is a filter. A vendor who cannot produce public API documentation on request either does not have one or does not want you to read it.
Commercials, implementation, support and exit
38. What is the total first-year cost — licence, implementation, data migration, training, integration work, and anything billed separately?
39. How does pricing change as we add users, locations, transaction volume or modules? Show me the cost at double our current size.
40. What is the annual price uplift, and is it capped in the contract?
41. Who does the implementation — the vendor, a partner, or us? How many hours of our people’s time does the vendor’s own estimate assume?
42. If we leave, how do we get our data out — which entities, in what format, and at what cost?
Question 42 is the one vendors least expect and the one that most reliably reveals how a company thinks about its customers. An answer involving a professional services quote is an answer.
How to run the process around the questions
Send questions 1–37 in writing before the first demo. Not all of them — pick the fifteen that matter most for your operation. Written answers before a live call change the shape of the call entirely, because the vendor arrives knowing they will be asked to demonstrate rather than describe.
Use your own data in the second demo. Send three or four real items with real BOMs and ask the vendor to configure them in advance. Sample data is chosen because it works. Your data is chosen because it is yours, and the gaps show up immediately.
Ask questions 38–42 last, and ask them of the finalist only. Commercial questions asked early get answered by a salesperson optimising for the deal. Asked at the point where both sides have invested time, they get answered more straightly.
Score numerically. Weight each question 1–3 by how much it matters to you, score each vendor 0–3, multiply. The purpose is not the total — it is that a weighted score forces you to decide what matters before you see the demos, rather than being persuaded afterwards.
The downloadable version of this checklist has all 42 questions with weighting and scoring columns for up to four vendors.
Download the checklist (XLSX) · Start a 15-day free trial and answer some of these yourself
FAQ
How long should an MRP selection process take? For a manufacturer under 100 people, six to ten weeks from first shortlist to signature is realistic. Materially faster usually means the requirements were never written down. Materially slower usually means nobody has been given authority to decide.
How many vendors should we shortlist? Three for demos. Two for the second round with your own data. More than three produces demo fatigue and worse decisions, not better ones.
Should we write a formal RFP? For this company size, usually not. A weighted question list and two structured demos gets you a better outcome than an RFP document, which tends to attract vendors good at answering RFPs rather than vendors good at manufacturing.
What if a vendor refuses to demonstrate something? Note it and move on, but note it precisely — “would not demonstrate a backward genealogy query” is a data point. Vendors who are confident in a capability will show it, because showing it wins deals.
Which of the 42 questions matter most? Questions 2, 19, 21, 33 and 42. Cost roll-up, forward genealogy, transaction-level lot enforcement, public API documentation, and data exit. Each one is a capability that is expensive to add later and easy to overstate in a demo.
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