Reading an ERP quote: the questions procurement forgets

The licence line is the part everyone compares and the part that varies least. Migration, training, integration ownership and renewal decide what the system actually costs.

Three quotes arrive. A committee builds a comparison sheet, lines up the per-student figures, and picks the middle one on the reasoning that the cheapest looks thin and the dearest is hard to justify to the trust. Two years later the same committee is explaining why the annual outlay is nearly double what was approved.

Nothing dishonest happened. The comparison simply measured the one number that all three vendors had already made comparable, and left every genuinely variable cost out of the sheet.

These are the questions worth asking before signature. Each one has a version of the answer that sounds reasonable in a meeting and costs money later, so the second column below matters more than the first.

Build the comparison over five years, not one

A five-year view exposes the costs that a first-year quote hides. Ask every vendor to fill the same rows, and require the figures in writing rather than in a presentation.

Ask the exit question first

The single most useful question in an ERP evaluation has nothing to do with features. If we leave in year four, what do we take with us, in what format, and what does it cost?

A vendor who answers plainly, naming the formats and confirming there is no charge for your own data, is telling you something about how the next four years will go. A vendor who treats the question as a sign of bad faith has answered it too.

Four answers worth more than a feature list

Feature grids converge, because every vendor ticks every row. These four questions do not converge.

An ERP decision is a ten-year relationship with a supplier, made on the strength of a six-week evaluation. Spend the evaluation on the things that will still be true in year five: who owns the data, who answers the phone in March, and what happens when your institution changes shape.