Opinionated guides for the people deciding.
A focused set of checklists for buyers, operators, and IT teams who are evaluating, deploying, or living with an operations layer on top of an ERP. Each guide is short, opinionated, and reflects what we have learned shipping the platform against real plants.
Decision-time questions.
For buyersHow to run a procurement conversation about an operations-layer overlay without getting steered into a 12-month ERP swap.
- 6 min
What to ask in a first vendor call
Twelve questions that separate operations-layer vendors that ship from ones that demo well. Includes the four red-flag answers, and the one specific question that distinguishes a real platform from a chatbot wrapped around a CRUD app.
Open guide - 7 min
Reading a vendor scoring matrix honestly
How weights get fudged, why the recommended row is usually correct anyway, and the three checks that catch a matrix tuned to land on a preferred supplier. Includes a worked example with a four-vendor scorecard.
Open guide - 8 min
When NOT to consolidate POs across plants
Consolidated procurement looks like a slam-dunk on paper. The three scenarios where it costs more than it saves: tight changeover windows, supplier capacity floors, and transfer-pricing optics.
Open guide
The day-to-day discipline.
For operatorsHow a line buyer, planner, or shop supervisor should think about working alongside an operations layer day to day.
- 5 min
Approval discipline for an operations layer
Why every approval needs a reason, when to use bulk approve, and the four signs that a proposal is masking something the system should have caught earlier in reasoning.
Open guide - 6 min
Reading a debounce window
A debounce window of 30 seconds vs 5 minutes is not a UX detail, it is a policy. What goes wrong when the window is too tight, what gets missed when it is too loose, and how to set one for a noisy vendor portal.
Open guide - 6 min
How to handle a stale-context override
When reasoning refuses to act because freshness is out of budget, the operator has three paths. The right one almost always has a 30-second cost and an evening of cleanup avoided.
Open guide
What IT needs to know.
For ITThe technical questions that actually matter when an operations layer is sitting on top of your ERP estate and writing back.
- 7 min
Integration scope for a 6-week pilot
What to wire up first, what to defer, and the two integration shapes that should never be on the critical path of a pilot (custom DB CDC and EDI 850 hand-rolls).
Open guide - 8 min
Audit log queryability requirements
An append-only audit log is necessary but not sufficient. The three queryability properties that determine whether you can pass an internal SOX review or an external compliance audit without a binder-pull exercise.
Open guide - 6 min
Idempotency keys 101 for ERP writes
Why the natural unit of the destination system matters more than your sequence ID, what a retry storm looks like in practice, and the three keys to pick for SAP MM, NetSuite, and a custom Oracle MDM.
Open guide