ERP Vendor Selection Advisory, Staffed by People Who Don’t Sell the Software
Every other voice in an ERP bake-off is on somebody’s payroll. The reseller’s architect, the vendor’s sales engineer, the integrator with a services quote already drafted. We place the one voice that’s on yours.
KORE1 places independent ERP vendor selection and RFP advisors on contract, contract-to-hire, and direct hire, with no implementation revenue riding on which system wins, a 17-day average time to first qualified submit, and 92% one-year retention.
Last updated: August 8, 2026
A distributor in the Inland Empire called us eleven weeks into an ERP evaluation. They had four proposals, a spreadsheet with 214 rows, and a controller who had been running the whole thing on top of a month-end close.
Three of the four vendors had answered “standard” to landed cost by lot. One of them meant it.
Nobody on that team had done this before, which is completely normal, because a mid-market company buys an ERP roughly twice in a generation and then lives inside the decision for the next twelve years. The people who buy ERP for a living all work for somebody selling it.
We don’t run your selection. We staff it.
KORE1 has recruited ERP consultants since 2005, and this particular seat comes up more often than it used to. Not the implementation consultant. The person who sits on the buyer’s side during requirements, the RFP, the demos, and the contract, and who leaves when the ink dries.
That distinction matters more than it sounds, and it’s the reason this page exists rather than a services brochure. An advisory firm that also implements has a second revenue event waiting on the other side of your decision. A contractor we place on your payroll has one job, a defined end date, and nothing downstream to protect.
Count the Payrolls Before the First Demo
Walk into a typical mid-market ERP demo and count the people. Two from the vendor, two or three from the reseller, sometimes a partner architect who flew in. All good at their jobs. All compensated on a close.
On the other side of the table, a controller, an ops director, and whoever from IT could clear the afternoon.
That asymmetry isn’t a scandal. It’s just the market working the way it works, and pretending otherwise is how buyers end up annoyed at vendors for behaving exactly as vendors are paid to behave. The fix isn’t outrage. It’s a seat.
What an independent advisor changes is quite narrow, and worth being honest about. They won’t make the software cheaper by force of personality. They’ll make sure the thing you’re comparing is the thing you’ll actually be running, that the “yes” you heard in a demo has a configuration path behind it, and that the number in the proposal covers the same scope on all four proposals.
Three of our last nine selection placements were brought in after a client had already picked a finalist and wanted somebody to pressure test the decision before signing. Two of the three finalists survived that review. One didn’t.
Every Answer in an RFP Gets Graded Twice
ERP RFPs run on response codes. A vendor marks each requirement Standard, Configuration, Modification, Third party, or Not supported, and those marks decide your shortlist, your budget, and your go-live date. The first column is what the vendor wrote. The second is what the scripted demo actually earned. Filling in that second column is most of the job.
- S Standard, out of the box
- C Configuration, no code
- M Modification, custom build
- T Third-party add-on
- N Not supported
Five requirements from one real shortlist round, anonymised. Two held. The three that moved didn’t move because anyone lied, they moved because “we support that” and “we support that without a build” are different sentences and only one of them has a price. A regrade from S to M on a single line has moved a proposal by six figures more than once on our desk.
Six Artifacts You Own When the Seat Ends
Advisory is a slippery word. Here is the paperwork a selection advisor leaves behind, all of it yours, none of it dependent on that person staying.
Every process the business actually runs, written as a testable statement rather than a feature name, weighted by who screams if it breaks. This is the document the rest of the selection hangs from, and most stalled evaluations we’re called into never had one.
A defensible longlist with reasons attached, narrowed to three to five vendors, and an RFP written in your language instead of a template’s. Response codes required on every line so the answers are comparable.
Scenarios drawn from your own transactions, sent to vendors two to three weeks ahead, run in the same order by every vendor. Unscripted demos are a sales asset. Scripted ones are an evaluation.
The second column, filled in. Claim against demonstration, scored by the people who watched, with the weighting agreed before anybody saw a product so nobody can quietly reweight toward a favourite afterward.
References the vendor didn’t hand pick where possible, called with a script, asked about the second year rather than the launch party. Our ERP recruiters hear the unfiltered version of these projects from candidates for a living.
Licence counts, escalation caps, the difference between the SOW hours and the estimate, and a written record of every scope assumption. Not legal advice, and your counsel still reads it, but somebody who has read forty of these first.
An Unscripted Demo Is a Commercial
Vendors are very good at demos. They should be. The demo is a rehearsed sequence built from the parts of the product that photograph well, and if you let it run unaltered you will watch four excellent films and learn almost nothing comparable.
Scripted demos fix that cheaply.
You take eight or ten scenarios out of your own transaction history, the awkward ones, and you send them to every vendor two to three weeks ahead. A return with a partial credit and a restocking fee. A rush order that ships from a second warehouse. The month you had to restate an intercompany elimination.
Then you make everyone run the same sequence, and you watch what happens at the moment the presenter says they’ll come back to that.
The advisor’s job during the demo isn’t to ask clever questions. It’s mostly to keep the room honest about what it just saw, because a demo generates enthusiasm and enthusiasm is what quietly rewrites a scorecard the following week. Anyone who has staffed an ERP implementation project manager into a rescue will tell you the same thing, which is that the gap between what a team believed it bought and what it configured is where the budget goes.
Five Stages, Roughly Ten to Sixteen Weeks
The advisor we place runs these. You approve at each gate. Depth changes with company size, order doesn’t.
- 01
Requirements
Two to four weeks of process interviews across finance, operations, and the warehouse floor. Output is a weighted register, not a wish list. Wish lists are how a 214-row spreadsheet happens.
- 02
Longlist and RFP
Market scan, a longlist with written reasons, then an RFP issued to three to five vendors with two to three weeks to respond. Response codes mandatory on every requirement line.
- 03
Scripted Demos
Scenarios out to vendors, then three to four weeks of demo sessions run in identical sequence. Scoring happens in the room while it’s fresh, not from memory on Friday.
- 04
Scoring and References
The second column gets filled in and the weighted totals get published to the group. Reference calls run in parallel, aimed at year two rather than go-live week.
- 05
Contract and Handoff
Two to three weeks on licence terms, SOW hours, and escalation caps, then a written handoff to whoever owns delivery. The advisor’s seat ends here by design.
The Profile Is Rarer Than the Title Suggests
Search “ERP selection consultant” and you’ll find a lot of people. Grade them and the pool shrinks fast, because the seat needs three things that don’t usually travel together.
Real depth in at least two ERP platforms, so comparison isn’t loyalty in disguise. Enough finance and operations literacy to know that landed cost by lot is a different animal from landed cost by average. And the temperament to tell a CFO that their favourite vendor scored third.
Most of the people who qualify came up through implementation. They’ve configured NetSuite, or Dynamics 365, or SAP S/4HANA, or Epicor, usually more than one, and at some point stopped wanting to carry a go-live.
Our screen goes at the disagreements. Tell me about a selection where you recommended against the client’s preferred vendor. What was the reasoning, what did you put in front of them, and where did it land. People who have genuinely held this seat answer in about four sentences and name the trade-off out loud. People who have sat next to it get vague.
If your gap is really strategy above the selection rather than the selection itself, that’s a fractional CIO for ERP and digital transformation. If the vendor is already chosen and the risk is delivery, start at ERP implementation project manager staffing. We’ll say which one on the intake call, including when the answer is that you don’t need us yet.
Three Shapes for the Same Seat
Same recruiters, same network. Pick the shape that matches how long the decision will take.
Contract & Contract-to-Hire
An hourly advisor on a KORE1 W-2 for the length of the selection, typically three to five months at 20 to 40 hours a week. Converts if the work turns into an ongoing program role.
Contract Staffing →Direct Hire
Right when ERP selection is the first of several system decisions and you want a permanent owner for enterprise applications rather than a temporary referee.
Direct Hire details →Project & Statement of Work
Outcome-priced delivery against the six artifacts above. Fits a board-mandated evaluation with a fixed date, or a second opinion on a shortlist you’ve already built.
Project Staffing →Common Questions
What does an ERP selection advisor actually do?
An ERP selection advisor runs the buyer’s side of an evaluation. They build the weighted requirements register, write and issue the RFP, script the vendor demos, score the responses against what was demonstrated, run reference calls, and review the licence agreement and statement of work before signature.
What they don’t do is implement. That boundary is the whole point of the role, and it’s the first thing to check in any proposal you’re handed, because an advisor with a delivery practice attached is being paid twice for one decision.
Can’t our own team run the RFP?
Often, yes. If you have a systems leader who has run a full selection before, a controller with capacity, and no board deadline, an internal process works and costs less.
Three conditions change that answer. Nobody on your team has run one of these start to finish. The evaluation has to share a calendar with close, budget season, or a peak shipping quarter. Or the decision is contested internally and needs somebody with no stake in the outcome to publish the scores. Any two of those together and an internal process usually stalls somewhere around week seven, which is roughly when the calls to us come in.
How is this different from hiring an ERP consulting firm?
Different commercial shape. A consulting firm sells you an engagement and keeps its own people. We place an individual advisor into your organisation on your payroll, reporting to you, with the deliverables and the working papers belonging to you when the seat ends.
Both are legitimate. A firm brings a bench and a methodology, which matters on a global multi-entity program. An embedded contractor costs less, sits in your meetings by default rather than by scheduled workshop, and can’t quietly become an implementation proposal in month four.
How long does an ERP selection take?
Plan on ten to sixteen weeks from kickoff to signature for a mid-market selection, split roughly into two to four weeks of requirements, two to three for RFP responses, three to four for scripted demos, and two to three for scoring, references, and contract.
Enterprise and multi-entity evaluations run longer, five to seven months is common. The single biggest variable isn’t the vendors, it’s how fast your own stakeholders can be assembled in one room, which is why the calendar work starts on day one and not after requirements are done.
What should we budget for an interim selection advisor?
Independent ERP consultants generally bill somewhere between $150 and $250 an hour in the U.S. market, so a part-time selection engagement of roughly 20 to 30 hours a week across four months lands in the low-to-mid five figures per month.
Weigh that against what the decision is worth. Panorama Consulting Group’s 2026 ERP Report found more than a quarter of organisations exceeded their project budgets, with additional technology needs cited as the leading cause, which is very often a requirement that was graded Standard in an RFP and turned out to need a third-party module. Our implementation cost calculator will size the other side of that equation before you set a budget.
Are independent advisors really vendor-neutral?
Not automatically. Neutrality is a commercial fact, not a personality trait, so ask three questions. Does this person or their firm earn implementation revenue. Do they hold reseller or referral agreements with any vendor on the longlist. Will they put both answers in writing.
Everyone has a background and a preference, and that’s fine, because a candidate who spent nine years in NetSuite will read a NetSuite proposal faster than anyone else in the room. What you’re screening for is disclosure and evidence of having recommended against their own platform at least once. We ask for that example on every screen, and it’s the question that thins the shortlist most.
What happens after we pick a vendor?
The advisory seat ends at contract signature and hands off to delivery. Some clients extend the same person for four to six weeks into mobilisation to hold the vendor to the scope that was scored, which is cheap insurance and usually worth it.
After that it’s a different hire entirely. Implementation needs a project manager and platform consultants, and the honest advice is not to let the person who graded the vendors run the build for the same reason you don’t let an auditor keep the books. If you want a sense of the market for those roles first, the 2026 ERP talent market report covers demand and pay bands, and the ERP readiness assessment will tell you whether you’re ready to start at all.
Send us the shortlist and the proposals. We’ll size the seat before you commit to it.
One intake call is usually enough to scope the evaluation, size the pool, and give you a real first-submit date.
Talk to an ERP Recruiter →