Lumenia ERP HEADtoHEAD™ Guest Blog from Tetiana Rohoza, Head of Marketing at AcuPower. 

Walk into any ERP evaluation event, and you will find manufacturers asking the same questions. How does the production scheduling work? What does the bill of materials functionality look like? Can the system handle our inventory across multiple sites? These are sensible things to want to know. They are also the questions every vendor is thoroughly prepared to answer.

The demonstrations are polished. The presenters know their software well. And after two days of product showcases, most delegates leave with a clear sense of which systems handle the features they care about. What they tend to leave without is any real understanding of the commercial and contractual realities that will shape the relationship for the next decade.

Between 55% and 75% of ERP implementations fail to meet their original objectives. The most frequently cited cause is not the software. It is the gap between what was presented during the sales process and what was discovered once the contract was signed and implementation began.

The five questions below will not appear on any vendor’s product roadmap. They concern pricing structure, configurability, data rights, customer references, and post-implementation support. They are the questions that experienced ERP buyers ask, and they tend to reveal far more about a vendor than any demonstration ever could.

Question 1: How does your pricing model work as our business grows?

Most ERP vendors will give you a day-one price without much difficulty. Getting a clear picture of what that price looks like in three or five years is considerably harder, and that is precisely where the conversation needs to go.

A large portion of the ERP market is still priced by user licence. On the surface, the logic seems reasonable: you pay for the people who use the system. For a growing manufacturing business, though, the implications compound in ways that are rarely made explicit during the sales process. Bring more staff onto the shop floor. Open a second facility. Acquire a business and bring it into the group. Each of these entirely normal growth decisions will require a fresh conversation with your ERP vendor about additional licence costs.

Ask every vendor this directly: what does our licence cost in three years if we add 20 users? Fifty? A hundred? What happens if we open a new legal entity or a warehouse in a second country? Push for specific figures rather than indicative pricing, and request confirmation in writing before you leave the stand.

Different vendors structure this very differently. Understanding the model at this stage will tell you a great deal about the commercial relationship you are entering into, and what your growth will actually cost you.

Question 2: What does it actually cost us to change things?

Manufacturing businesses do not stand still. Processes change, product lines evolve, regulatory requirements shift, and supply chains get restructured. The ERP system you implement today needs to reflect the business you will be running in five years, not just the one you are running now.

When you need to adapt the system to reflect those changes, the key question is: who does it, and what does it cost? Some platforms require you to return to your implementation partner, or to the vendor’s own professional services team, every time you need to adjust a workflow, modify an approval process or change a report. At typical day rates, this accumulates quickly. Other systems are designed so that your own team can make configuration changes without specialist development skills.

Ask vendors to show you what a configuration change looks like in practice, rather than simply telling you it is straightforward. Watch what happens when someone adjusts a production workflow, adds a field to a form, modifies a report or connects a third-party application. The ease or difficulty of those actions will tell you a great deal about how much autonomy you will have once the system is live.

Question 3: If we decided to leave in three years, what happens to our data?

Nobody enters an ERP relationship expecting to exit it. For that precise reason, the departure terms rarely get scrutinised during the procurement process. You should scrutinise them now, before anything is signed.

There are three specific things worth establishing. In what format is your data returned? How long does that process take? And what does the contract actually say about it?

Most vendors will not volunteer this information during the sales process. Some contracts make data extraction slow, expensive or deliberately complex. Under UK GDPR, you have a legal right to your data, but the contract governs how easy or painful the vendor can make the process of actually returning it. These are not the same thing, and the gap between them can be significant.

A vendor who answers this question directly and without hesitation is sending a clear signal about the kind of long-term customer relationship they intend to build. A vendor who deflects, redirects or gets visibly uncomfortable is also sending a signal, of a rather different kind.

Question 4: Can you introduce us to UK manufacturers of a similar size in our sector?

Every vendor at a comparative evaluation event will have case studies. Most of them are carefully curated: the customer is happy to be referenced, the implementation went well, and the testimonial reflects that. A case study is a marketing asset. It is not a reference.

Ask for something more specific: three UK-based manufacturers, comparable in size to your organisation, working in a related industry. Ask the vendor to arrange an introduction rather than simply handing you contact details.

When you do speak to those customers, the most useful questions are usually the ones vendors do not anticipate. What do they know now that they wished they had known before they signed? What were the first six months post-implementation genuinely like? Would they make the same decision again, and what would they do differently?

Those conversations will tell you more than two full days of structured demonstrations. A vendor who cannot, or will not, facilitate them is a vendor who is not confident in what their customers would say.

Question 5: Who is responsible for our implementation, and what does support look like after go-live?

In the ERP market, there is an important distinction between the software vendor and the implementation partner. The vendor builds the product. The partner makes it work in your business. In many cases, these are entirely separate organisations, and the quality, experience and long-term commitment of your implementation partner will have a greater impact on your outcomes than the software itself.

At the evaluation event, find out who will actually run your project. Ask for the experience profiles of the consultants who will be on-site. Ask what happens if a key person leaves mid-project. And ask specifically what support looks like, not at go-live, but six months after that, and two years after that.

Go-live tends to be treated as the endpoint of the project. For most manufacturing businesses, it is better understood as the start of a different, longer phase: the system being optimised, embedded into daily operations and adapted as the business continues to evolve. Who accompanies you through that phase matters considerably more than who delivers the cleanest demonstration. 

Why these questions matter more than the feature list

ERP selection events like the ERP HEADtoHEAD™ are genuinely useful environments for comparative evaluation. The demonstrations follow a consistent script, which makes it possible to assess competing products side by side in a way that the traditional procurement process rarely allows.

The demonstration, however, shows you what the software can do under controlled conditions. These five questions reveal what the relationship will look like once conditions are no longer controlled: when you are growing faster than expected, when you need to change direction, and when things do not go to plan.

The vendors worth taking seriously are the ones who welcome these questions rather than redirecting you back to the product. Confidence in the answer is itself informative.

Meet us at ERP HEADtoHEAD™, Birmingham, 24–25 March

AcuPower will be representing Acumatica at the ERP HEADtoHEAD™ at The Eastside Rooms, Birmingham, on 24 and 25 March 2026. We would encourage you to bring these five questions to Stand 9 and put them to us directly. We will have answers to all of them.

The ERP HEADtoHEAD™, organised by Lumenia Consulting, brings together 14 leading ERP vendors for script-based demonstrations across two days. Delegates can compare systems side by side, attend showcase presentations, speak directly with vendor representatives, and arrange one-to-one meetings.

Register your place at erpheadtohead.com. Use code AcuH2H for 20% off the delegate fee. 

About the author: Tetiana Rohoza is Head of Marketing at AcuPower, a UK-based Acumatica implementation partner specialising in ERP solutions for growing businesses across manufacturing, distribution, and professional services.