Choosing and Rolling Out a System

How to buy and implement without the 8-month onboarding disasters.

1. Write your requirements before you shopHow to turn your own operation into a one-page requirements list — your real process, your volumes, your must-haves, and the connections you need — so vendors sell to your needs instead of to their own strengths.
2. Evaluate a system without getting soldHow to run demos and reference calls that surface the truth about a system — scripting them around your own scenarios so a vendor cannot hide a lot-number field, an oversold integration, or a cost that only appears after you sign.
3. Single source of truth: don't become the integration layerHow to architect your stack around a single source of truth — naming one owner for each kind of data, telling a healthy connection from a brittle one, and deciding what to consolidate versus what to merely connect — so your team stops re-keying and reconciling between systems.
4. Roll out a new system in weeks, not monthsHow to run an implementation that lands in weeks instead of dragging into an eight-month ordeal — phasing the rollout around your highest-pain workflow, running your old system in parallel until the numbers reconcile, and training the floor before the switch — so the day you go live is a quiet Tuesday, not a crisis.
5. Move your data in clean, leave the mess behindHow to move your items, recipes, lots, and balances into a new system without carrying in the duplicates, mismatched units, and untied counts that would corrupt it from hour one — cleaning the master data before it loads, proving your opening balances and open lots after, and keeping a way back if the load goes wrong.