The Brewer Company, a leading manufacturer of roofing and pavement maintenance materials, opted for SYSPRO ERP to help the move the company forward. The concise press release does not give any indication how thorough the ERP selection process was here. The selection steps were as follows:

• Preliminary 90–120-minute phone conversations were conducted with the 13 candidate ERP vendors.
• Brewer invited all of the candidates to the plant to observe the company’s operations, giving the company’s management the chance to query each vendor face to face.
• Brewer narrowed the list of candidates to the following four: SYSPRO, Sage ERP X3, Sage 500 ERP, and ProcessPro.
• Brewer conducted a webinar outlining its expectations and its ERP and IT needs.
• Amended proposals from the final four were reviewed by Brewer staff—its “islands of excellence.”
• The Brewer teams voted for SYSPRO.

It is not clear which of these steps included detailed software demos. Ideally, these would be conducted with scripted scenarios using Brewer’s mockup-up data. My guess is that some of that happened in the last two steps. It would be hard to believe that anyone would select a mission-critical solution without putting it through its paces. In any case, the selection of SYSPRO is neither surprising nor ill-advised.

Profile: SYSPRO
TEC article (Jan 2012): SYSPRO—Taking a Quantum Leap or Simply Becoming Smarter?