I used to build ERP demos. I scripted the flows and chose which workflows you'd see and, more to the point, which you wouldn't. None of that is dishonest. Every vendor builds the demo around the product's strengths, loads it with clean data and rehearses the happy path until it looks effortless.

The clean order that's in stock and picked right takes care of itself in any decent system. Your team's day gets eaten by exceptions: the count that doesn't match, the return on an order that shipped wrong. Exceptions might be 10 percent of your volume and 60 percent of your labor, and a standard demo contains none of them.

So bring these five requests, and don't accept a slide where you asked for a live screen.

1. "Show me a cycle count where the count doesn't match the system." Any system can show a count screen. You need the discrepancy workflow: who gets told, what approving the adjustment looks like, and whether the system helps you find the cause or just papers over it. If the presenter has never opened that screen in a demo before, you'll see it in how long it takes to find.

2. "Show me what happens when the e-commerce order and the ERP disagree." An order exists in Shopify but not in the ERP, or a quantity update failed overnight. Ask to see the conflict surface on screen. A good answer is an exception queue and an alert. A bad one is a diagram with arrows.

3. "Process a return on an order that was mispicked in the first place." Two exceptions stacked: the customer sends back an item that isn't the one the system thinks they have. Real warehouses see this every week. Systems that handle it cleanly tend to handle everything else cleanly too. Systems that choke on it will choke on your Tuesdays.

4. "Run that same workflow with our part numbers and our units of measure." Demo data hides friction. Every SKU is tidy and every unit is "each." Send the vendor a sample of your real item master ahead of time and ask them to load it. If they push back on loading twenty of your SKUs, picture the implementation with twenty thousand.

5. "Show me the screen the picker sees, on the device they'd hold." Demos run on big monitors showing dashboards, because executives are in the room. Accuracy is won or lost on a handheld, with small type, glare, gloves and a picker moving fast. Ask to see that screen on that hardware.

Reading the room

You learn as much from how these land as from the software. A presenter who handles all five easily is showing you a product with depth beyond the script and a team that's stood in front of operators before. One "let me circle back on that" is fine. A pattern of them on exceptions means the exceptions live outside the product's comfort zone, and your operation lives in its exceptions.

Send the list a few days ahead. It isn't giving away the test. A vendor who preps hard for your ugliest scenarios is showing you how they'll behave during implementation, and a vendor who gets your list and runs the canned script anyway is showing you that too.