Inversely we tend to place far more weight on sitting through 4 or 5 exhausting ERP sales demos one after another, after another, after another. Please Note: sales demos last a few hours. It takes a few years to become fluent on any ERP. Falling in love with a Demo is very risky business.

Carefully define your strategic questions you plan to ask references.  Obviously consider the critical requirements of your organization and industry. However, there are less obvious questions that can provide even more unique insight. Eg. Which system did they use before? What did they like/dislike about it? You want perspective regarding the value of their opinion. If they had a more basic system like Sage 300 previously, any new system probably feels amazing. Consider perspective.

Also focus on what they do not like! To save time and money, you want to uncover the cold hard truth as soon as you can. You need to decide if you can live with those challenges (or not). Or at best, if you do buy it you did so with your eyes wide open regarding its limitations and will proactively plan work arounds.

If any reference says everything is unicorns, fluffy clouds, peaches and cream, they were set up what to say by the ERP vendor. Every company dislike something about their ERP. You want to uncover what that is.

Discount surface-level answers. You never want to ask ‘how do you like it?’ A common answer is ‘we love it.’ What will you learn from that? Their answer will add zero value. And you only get so many questions to ask before your interviewees becomes testy.

Ask every ERP salesperson for a list of customers that are local (so you can confirm local support); That are a similar size (you have only 1 IT person and want to speak with references that employ 1 as well): That are already using the same critical requirement you expect.

You want to see these lists before you will speak with the ERP salesperson again. If they don’t have any that match, why are you speaking with them? Besides when they do provide a list, they will be representative to what you should expect and they will be more objective as they will not be that vendors’ 3 best customers.

There are always problems with ERPs. You want to know what they are before you sign. Find out after is too late.

Secure an impartial and public assessments by independently verifying the vendor's track record. Dive into online reviews, industry forums, User Groups, Blog sites, Pod casts and other sources to gather 3rd party, objective perspectives on vendors. Save time and money evaluating only those ERP vendors who pass muster.

In summary, confidently selecting an ERP vendor demands laser focus on reference data gathering. Why not learn from some one else’s mistakes?