Somewhere along the way, the ERP industry decided that the best way to choose a multi-million dollar technology partner is to hand them a spreadsheet with 500 to 1,000 line items and ask them to mark “yes,” “no,” or “with customization” next to each one.
This has become so standard that most manufacturers assume it’s the only way. It isn’t. And it’s arguably the worst way to identify which vendor will actually help your business.
What the RFP actually measures
A traditional ERP RFP measures one thing very well: which vendor has the most experienced proposal team. The vendors who win RFPs are not necessarily the ones with the best technology or the deepest understanding of your industry. They are the ones with dedicated RFP response teams who have answered the same 500 questions hundreds of times.
Meanwhile, the smaller vendor with deep manufacturing expertise and a genuinely better solution for your specific challenges loses because their proposal team is their implementation team, and they’re busy delivering results for other clients.
The RFP process systematically filters out the insight you need most: which vendor truly understands my business and has creative ideas about how to improve it?
What to do instead
Replace the RFP with what we call a Vendor Engagement Brief. Instead of 500 feature questions, you share three things with each vendor:
- Your Business Outcomes Charter — the 2–3 measurable outcomes you need to achieve, with current-state and target-state KPIs
- Your operational context — a narrative description of your business, your challenges, your industry constraints, and what your team deals with day to day
- One question: “How would you help us achieve these outcomes?”
Then you step back and see what comes back.
What this reveals
The responses you get will tell you more in 10 pages than a 500-line RFP response ever could.
The vendor who sends back a thoughtful, specific proposal that references your actual challenges and proposes approaches you hadn’t considered? That’s a potential partner.
The vendor who sends back a generic response full of marketing language and screenshots of their software? That tells you everything you need to know.
The vendor who pushes back on one of your assumptions and offers a different way to think about the problem? That’s the conversation you need to be having.
None of this is visible in a traditional RFP. The RFP format actively prevents it by constraining the vendor to answering your questions instead of showing you how they think.
Replace scripted demos with scenarios
The same principle applies to demos. Instead of handing the vendor a 30-point checklist of screens you want to see, give them a scenario built from your actual business.
If your target outcome is improving quoting throughput, hand the vendor a real RFQ from one of your customers and say: “Walk us through how your system would handle this, from receipt to quote delivery.”
You will immediately see whether the vendor understands manufacturing quoting, whether their system handles the complexity of your business, and whether their team can think on their feet. A scripted demo shows you polished screens. A scenario-based evaluation shows you what working with this vendor will actually feel like.
The vendor’s reaction tells you everything
When you approach vendors this way, pay close attention to how they respond to the format itself. The best vendors will welcome it. They are tired of filling out RFPs that don’t let them differentiate. They want the chance to show how they think, not just what their software does.
The vendors who resist it, who ask for a traditional RFP instead, who want the scripted demo format, are telling you something important about how they will behave as an implementation partner. If they can’t adapt their sales process, they probably won’t adapt their implementation approach to your specific needs either.
Ready to try a different approach?
Our Vendor Partnership Engagement phase replaces the traditional RFP with a process that reveals which vendors are real partners. See how it works →