A Practical Checklist for Selecting Manufacturing Software

Questions that separate a system that will fit your operation from one that will need your operation to change.

Demos are designed to look good. The useful part of an evaluation is the part where you bring your own data and your own awkward cases.

Ask how the system handles the things that are actually hard in your shop: partial receipts, substitutions, rework loops, outside processing, split lots, and the customer who changes quantity two days before ship.

Ask what implementation actually requires from your team in hours per week, who cleans the data, and what the first ninety days look like. Ask what happens when you outgrow the initial scope.

Finally, ask what it costs to stop. A system you can leave is a system the vendor has to keep earning.