How is this different from a vendor's discovery process?

A WMS vendor's discovery process and an independent assessment look superficially similar. Both involve walking through the operation, both ask about workflows and requirements, both produce documentation that informs the system selection. The difference isn't in the activity. It's in what each process is structurally built to surface.

A vendor's discovery process is part of a sales motion. It's not dishonest — the discovery team is asking real questions, and the documentation is real work. But the process is built to find the path from where the founder is to a signed contract for the vendor's product. That structural job determines what discovery surfaces and what it doesn't. It surfaces the requirements the vendor's product can demonstrably support. It surfaces the workflows that map cleanly to the system's strengths. It does not go looking for the operational realities that would expose fit problems with the vendor's own offering, because no sales motion is structured to disqualify itself. Strategic omission isn't a failure of vendor discovery. It's a feature of how every vendor's discovery is designed to operate.

An independent assessment has a different structural job. It's built to surface what the operation actually needs a system to do — including the workarounds, edge cases, and process gaps the founder has stopped seeing because proximity blindness has made them invisible — and to evaluate that against the vendor market without a stake in which vendor wins. The assessment surfaces the things vendor discovery has no incentive to surface. It documents the operation as it actually runs, not as it has been described. It produces a baseline that exists independently of any vendor's product.

The gap between the two isn't quality of work. It's whose interests each process is built around. Vendor discovery is the founder's operation seen through the lens of the vendor's product. Independent assessment is the founder's operation seen through the lens of what the operation actually needs. Both are useful. Only one produces a foundation the founder can evaluate vendors against rather than from inside.

The System Fit Sprint exists because the structural conditions of an independent assessment — no vendor relationships, no implementation revenue, no stake in which system wins — are not conditions any vendor's discovery process can replicate. Not because vendors are doing something wrong, but because the discovery process is doing exactly what a sales motion is supposed to do. The founder who treats vendor discovery as a substitute for independent assessment is not getting a worse version of the same thing. They're getting a different thing, designed for a different outcome.