What's the WMS selection process?

If you search for this, you'll find a sequence: gather requirements, build a shortlist, run demos, check references, negotiate, contract. The sequence isn't wrong. It's downstream of the harder problem.

The selection process most founders run is structurally compromised before the first vendor conversation. Requirements documents reflect what you believe your operation needs, filtered through proximity blindness — the workarounds and exceptions that define how things actually run have become invisible through normalization. Shortlists are shaped by which vendors were visible and recommended, not by which vendors fit. Demos respond to the mental model you describe, not the floor reality. Every input the process depends on was shaped before the process began.

A useful selection process has two phases the conventional version skips.

First, an operational baseline that captures what proximity has made invisible. Built before any requirements list gets written. Second, a fit-filtered shortlist built from a vantage point that reflects how vendors actually perform in implementation, not how they present in demos.

Both phases happen before the first vendor demo. They aren't preparation steps. They're the inputs that determine whether the rest of the process produces a defensible decision or a documented version of an availability-biased one.

Founders who skip those phases and go straight to vendor conversations are running a process that feels rigorous because effort goes in. The output is a shortlist filtered by visibility and a vendor evaluation run through a buyer-only frame. Both are predictable failures of a structurally compromised process. Not failures of effort.