Running ERP Demos That Matter

We ran our first round of scripted ERP demos this week. After six hours of watching vendors work through our actual business scenarios, I'm convinced this approach is the only way to evaluate enterprise software. Here's how we structured it.

The Anti-Demo Demo

Standard ERP demos are vendor-controlled theater. They show you happy paths with perfect data, skip over complexity, and emphasize features that look impressive but may not matter for your business. At the end, you've learned what the vendor wants you to know, not what you need to know.

Our approach: scripted scenarios using our actual data, our actual processes, our actual exceptions. The vendor doesn't control the narrative - they have to show us how their system handles our reality.

The Demo Script

We built scenarios covering our critical processes:

Catch Weight Order Entry. Customer orders 50 pounds of NY Strip. How does the system handle order entry with estimated weight, actual picking with real weight, invoice adjustment for actual delivered quantity? We use three demonstration SKUs: USDA Prime NY Strip (simple catch weight), Jasper Hill Blue cheese (variable weight with lot tracking), and Chef's Microgreens Sampler (fixed weight, no catch weight complexity).

Customer-Specific Pricing. Take a customer with formula-based pricing tied to a market index, volume rebates, and a promotional discount on specific products. Show us how pricing gets calculated, how invoices reflect the complexity, how the sales team can see what price a customer will pay before committing to the order.

Exception Handling. A truck breaks down mid-route. Some deliveries need to be rescheduled. Some products need to be returned to inventory. Some need to be transferred to another truck. Walk us through how the system handles this operationally.

Integration Scenario. An order comes in through our Adobe Commerce B2B portal. Show us how it flows into the ERP, how inventory gets allocated, how the WMS (we're keeping BFC Dakota) gets notified, how the customer gets order confirmation and delivery tracking.

What We Learned

D365 handled the catch weight scenarios well - the functionality is mature. The pricing complexity took some configuration work to demonstrate, but it got there. Integration story was strong given the Power Platform underpinning.

Aspen Canopy crushed the food distribution specifics - their team didn't need any explanation of our scenarios because they've seen them hundreds of times. But the integration demo required more custom development explanation than I'd hoped.

Both had moments where the demo team said "let me show you how we'd handle that" instead of showing us the happy path. That's what we wanted - honest assessment of fit, not sales performance.

The Scoring

Our evaluation team scored each scenario independently before discussing. This prevents the loudest voice in the room from dominating. We averaged scores and then discussed the outliers - places where evaluators disagreed significantly usually revealed something worth understanding more deeply.

Demo scores aren't the whole picture - we still have reference calls, technical deep-dives, and TCO modeling to complete. But demos carry significant weight because they show what the software actually does, not what marketing materials claim.

Two more demo days scheduled this month. Then we narrow to our final two candidates.