Five real options where there had been one foregone conclusion before the Sprint.
Why this may look familiar
This one is a produce distributor, but the shape is common: one operation spread across buildings that grew up separately, inventory in the racks the company doesn't own, and a warehouse system being chosen while an ERP project runs ahead of it. If your operation runs on rules it doesn't set, the specifics below will look familiar.
- 2 of 5
- vendors on the final shortlist had never come up before the Sprint
- +200%
- markup the cheapest quote in the room needed to become realistic
- ~$1M
- ten-year gap between either finalist and the vendor they started with
A private-equity-backed produce group already held an interest in a fresh-produce distributor running two facilities, one on each coast. When it moved to modernize the business, it found an ERP that its own VP of Tech called barely functional, and a warehouse operation running mostly on paper. The replacement was already settled. The sponsor had blessed one ERP platform across the portfolio, and it was already running in several of the group's other businesses. The distributor was getting its own standalone instance of it.
That rollout was further along than the warehouse question, so the WMS decision had to catch up to it. The VP of Tech was running both, on top of a handful of other responsibilities. He wasn't a first-time buyer either: two warehouse systems rolled out himself, a third corrected after it had gone wrong, process-improvement work inside a fourth. He hired an outside advisor anyway, and was explicit about why.
"As an impartial third party, after we end our engagement you're not going to have to deal with the ultimate consequences. So, your honest opinion: which is your number one, and which is your number two?"
The field before the Sprint was one vendor deep
The ERP reseller suggested an add-on that ran inside the ERP itself. The VP had turned up one large vendor on his own and raised another from memory. That was the entire field: three names, two from his own recall and one from a reseller recommending inside the platform it sells. Recommending within your own ecosystem is what a reseller is for, and nobody was hiding it. But none of the three came from a search of the market.
Two buildings that had grown up separately
A full onsite day at each building. What surfaced was a rotation rule the team was already following without knowing it, putaway logic living in people's heads instead of in a system, and information moving on paper, so one person could know something a day before anyone else did. Plus a dock problem at the West Coast site that nobody had written down: trucks routinely sitting in the yard because nothing in the process told the dock they were there.
None of it was hidden; it had all been normalized. When the rotation rule was named on the delivery call, the VP reached the same conclusion himself, immediately.
Ten levers, not several hundred features
Most WMS comparisons run to several hundred rows, and most of those rows are table stakes every vendor clears. The Sprint filtered the market on ten operational specifics that would rule most systems out: traceability with logic behind it rather than a text field, repack and yield, attribute-based putaway, freshness-managed rotation, catch weight, dock and yard control. The ones that could actually do the work were left standing.
Two of the five vendors that reached the final analysis had already been raised inside the business, so they needed a documented answer rather than a quiet disappearance. Setting out why they didn't fit is what made it possible to argue for the ones that did. Two others hadn't come up in any conversation before the Sprint, and several more were cut before the scorecard existed.
The 3PL nobody had named
A day before the deliverable review, the VP learned something new about the business his group had taken over. Latin American suppliers with no US sales arm of their own were asking the distributor to take product on consignment: hold it, sell what it could, write off the rest. For the supplier it was the only practical route into the US market. From the distributor's side it read as a favor for a partner.
That's inventory sitting in your building that you don't own, inside an ERP that assumes you own what you hold. It's a third-party logistics problem wearing a distributor's hat, and it arrived late enough that a vendor-run evaluation would have found it after signature. It changed nothing about the shortlist, because the systems that had survived the filter could already absorb it. The filter had been built on the shape of the operation rather than on the requirements anyone had thought to write down.
Scoring the company behind the software
A selection of dimensions from the client's Vendor Intelligence Report, anonymized and lightly relabelled. The questions and the ratings are as delivered. A buyer running the process alone doesn't ask these, because none of them are about the software.
None of these dimensions came out of this engagement. They come from a research base that compounds across every Sprint: how a vendor behaves once the contract is signed, which ones are digesting an acquisition, where support actually goes after hours. A buyer runs this process once or twice in a career and starts from scratch each time.
How that research base is built →| Dimension | Vendor A | Vendor B | Vendor C | Vendor D | Vendor E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Industry Focus Does the vendor focus on produce, or are you a "niche" use case? | Focused | Focused | Niche | Niche | Niche |
| Account Priority Would you be a priority account for them, or a rounding error? | High | Strategic | High | Low | High |
| Ownership Change Is the company currently swallowing a merger or acquisition? | Acquired — Stable | Acquired — Stable | N/A | Acquired — Risky | N/A |
| Support Model Something breaks on a weekend shift. Is there a real answer? | Ticket Queue | Dedicated Team | Ticket Queue | Ticket Queue | Project-based |
| Contract Terms Is the contract built on lock-in or on proving value? | Standard SaaS | Value-Aligned | Standard SaaS | Lock-In | Standard SaaS |
| Data Access How easy is it to get your own data out for reporting? | API | API / Direct | API | Proprietary Export | ERP-native |
Further sections covered product fit against the ten operational levers, and cost across five and ten years.
Then the part where vendors normally take the wheel
The Sprint ended with a ranked recommendation. The VP bought Vendor Scrutiny, the optional second phase that follows the Sprint, and the demos ran on scripts built from his own critical levers instead of the walkthrough the vendors usually give. Every vendor answered the same hard scenarios, and none of them chose which parts of the system to show.
Fullstride sat in on the demos and graded them, then normalized the quotes into comparable hours, because vendors price in days, blocks and rates that don't line up. The contract review turned up one vendor, introduced late by the ERP consultants, working from paper drafted for another country's contracting norms: annual increases pegged to a foreign inflation index, and no meaningful term limit, against the three percent caps the others had already conceded. Implementation estimates are optimistic as a rule, so every one on the table got marked up — twenty-five percent for the most disciplined vendor, two hundred percent for the cheapest quote in the room.
The recommendation was conditional, and said so. If the distributor committed to handling repack inside the ERP module, one order held. If they wanted the warehouse system to own the whole floor, a different vendor was untouchable on capability, and the question became who would implement it rather than who built it. A ranking that collapses a decision the client hasn't made yet into one number is easier to read and worth less.
The quote, and what the quote was actually going to cost
Figures rounded. The two ranking columns answer different questions: one is what the analysis concluded, the other is what the vendors proved when they had to run someone else's scenarios. They disagree, and the gap between them is the difference between the vendor most likely to serve this operation and the vendor best at showing that it would.
| Quoted year one | Markup applied | Realistic year one | 10-year cost | Analysis rank | Demo rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor A | $400k | +25% | $455k | $2.11M | 3rd | 2nd |
| Vendor B | $610k | +50% | $840k | $2.43M | Discard | Discard |
| Vendor C | $205k | +50% | $270k | $1.06M | 1st | 3rd |
| Vendor F | $195k | +50% | $245k | $1.14M | 2nd | 1st |
| Vendor E | $80k | +200% | $150k | $580k | Discard | Discard |
Vendor D was cut during the Sprint and never reached this stage. Vendor F arrived from the ERP consultants after the Sprint closed.
The cheapest quote in the room was less than a fifth of the most expensive, and it got discarded anyway, because it couldn't do the work and the quote was light by a factor of three. The most expensive was capable, reputable, and roughly twice the ten-year cost of either finalist. Neither conclusion is visible from the buyer's side of a sales process.
How it ended
The two finalists split the room. Operations wanted the young, hungry vendor that had run their scenarios best. The technology side leaned toward the established one with the lower ten-year cost and dozens of prior integrations with the ERP they were adopting. Both positions were defensible, and the analysis said so, which meant nobody had to argue from instinct.
Fullstride reviewed the contracts and put the concerns and the preferences on the record. Then the engagement ended, and the decision stayed with the people who have to live with it. Fullstride doesn't sit in the negotiation, doesn't implement, and doesn't follow the deal to signature for a share of it.
The strongest answer to the West Coast yard problem turned out to be a product category outside the warehouse-system market altogether. That went into the recommendation too, with an offer to make the introduction. No fee, and none expected. It was simply the better answer to that problem, and the job was to get every option that merited a look in front of them.
This story doesn't end with a signature, and it can't. Following the deal that far would take a stake in the outcome, which is the one thing the engagement is built not to have. The client's own verdict came instead, and it had nothing to do with which vendor won.
"Because it's from a third party, it's going to add some validity."
"Early on I felt like I was going to be committed to one vendor whether I liked it or not. Now I feel like we actually have real options."
Neither finalist was in the room before the Sprint. On the ten-year figures in the scorecard, either one lands roughly a million dollars below the vendor they had started with, against a fixed fee that is a small fraction of that gap. That is not money anyone banked: the projections are deliberately naive, and the decision was still theirs to make.
"The options you brought to the table were things that would have been excluded otherwise, so the value was there for the company just based on that alone."
Spoken quotes are drawn from recorded calls and condensed for readability. Vendor names are withheld throughout.
Your operation isn't this one.
The levers that decide a system are specific to how you actually run. The Sprint documents yours, filters the vendor market against them, and hands you a ranked recommendation before you talk to a single vendor.
No vendor relationships. No referral fees. No stake in what you pick.