Too many vendor evaluations start with a demo and end with a 47-line integration requirements document that lands on your desk after the business has already committed. You need the full technical picture before, not after, the decision. The operations team has already fallen in love with the demo. Now IT inherits the integration complexity. This pattern is avoidable — and we avoid it by scoping integration at discovery, not post-signature.

When operations adopts a new tool and users struggle, IT gets the support tickets. You need a vendor who owns the adoption process and provides the training, documentation, and support infrastructure to keep those tickets low. The floor-first deployment model means operators and supervisors are trained by our implementation team — not by IT staff who are learning the system alongside them.

Your team is already stretched. A platform that requires 6 months of IT-led configuration before the business sees value is not a platform — it is a project that competes with everything else on your roadmap. Your backlog already has ERP upgrades, security patches, and infrastructure projects queued. Adding a 6-month vendor implementation led by IT is not realistic — and it should not be necessary.

You have seen vendors that make it easy to put data in and difficult to get data out. You need assurance that your operational data remains accessible, exportable, and portable — regardless of the vendor relationship's future.

Manufacturing data — production volumes, quality metrics, customer specifications — is sensitive. You need to know where it lives, who can access it, and how it is protected. You need answers to these questions during evaluation, documented in writing, not discovered during a security review after the purchase order is signed.