Most of the evaluation time in a WMS, TMS or logistics ERP selection goes to the thing that discriminates least between the candidates.
A selection tests five things:
- Functional fit — what the platform handles for your operation
- Technology — how it is built, how it integrates, how it scales, how it ages
- Strategic alignment — whether the vendor is going the same way you are
- The vendor — who stands behind the platform, and for how long
- Implementation method — how the vendor turns your operation into a working system
Only the first is about features, and it absorbs most of the room’s attention because the functional checklist is what every credible vendor has prepared hardest for. By the time you have three serious candidates, their coverage looks broadly similar. The other four decide whether you are still happy with this decision in year three.
Get the order right first
The most common process error is collecting evidence before deciding what matters. Demos get scheduled, the RFP goes out, references get called — and the criteria emerge afterwards, shaped by whatever the vendors happened to show.
Three passes instead, and the first one happens before you meet anyone.
Set the bar, then measure what you already have. Start from where the business intends to be next year, in five years, in ten. From that, derive what score you would need on each of the five dimensions and how much each one weighs. Then score your current systems and current vendor against that bar. Not a list of complaints — a measured distance between where you stand and what your own ambition requires.
Score the candidates on the same scale. The question is not who scores highest overall, but who moves you furthest against the goals you set in the first pass.
Then demand the evidence. A vendor can prepare for a demo, so the form of the third pass decides what you learn. A scripted demonstration shows you what was rehearsed; a workshop on your own processes, or a small proof of concept on your own data, shows how the vendor behaves when the material is unfamiliar. Bring what they have not seen.
| What it tests | Who usually raises it | The evidence to demand |
|---|---|---|
| Functional fit — what the platform handles for your operation | COO, operations lead | Have them configure your most awkward exception live, not describe it. Then ask who could have done that: their consultant, or your own team |
| Technology — how it is built, how it integrates, how it scales, how it ages | CIO, CTO | The upgrade history of a heavily configured customer across three versions, and a security certification rather than a security slide |
| Strategic alignment — whether the vendor is going the same way you are | CEO, CFO | The roadmap, and something they deliberately decided not to build — with the reasoning |
| The vendor — who stands behind the platform, and for how long | CEO, CFO | A reference that operates like you do, spoken to without the vendor in the room, asked about the worst month of the project |
| Implementation method — how the vendor turns your operation into a working system | COO, IT lead | The requirement structure and test scenarios from a comparable implementation, and the proposed split of configuration work for your case |
Functional fit: coverage is not the same question as movement
The question that separates them is commercial rather than technical. What do your customers come to you for that they could not get from the operator down the road, and how much of that sits in flows no standard system expects? An operator running standard A-to-B transport needs a system that does those processes well and little more. An operator that wins work precisely by taking on the awkward handling and the requirements a customer could not place elsewhere needs a system that can hold all of that without a development project each time.
A second distinction explains a large share of failed selections: which kind of organisation the software was designed around. Some systems are built for shippers controlling their own transport — SAP TM, Oracle OTM. Others for operators who sell logistics: CargoWise leads internationally and is strongest in containerised forwarding, Descartes brings the widest network connectivity, Boltrics is strong in standardised warehousing. A shipper system accounts for cost. An operator platform has to know revenue, cost and margin per shipment and invoice a different contract per customer.
Technology is not the programming language
Four things sit under this heading. Integration, where the real question is not which protocols are supported but whether your own people can build and monitor a new customer interface, or whether every connection is a vendor project with a price and a queue. The data model, which decides what you will be able to ask the system in three years. Scale, tested against your own growth plan rather than a benchmark. And security, where the question is not whether they take it seriously but whether they can prove it — certification, third-party penetration testing, documented incident handling.
There is real money attached. MuleSoft’s 2025 Connectivity Benchmark, surveying 1,050 IT leaders in large enterprises, found development teams spending 39% of their time building custom integrations. A mid-sized operator runs a handful of core systems rather than hundreds of applications, but the proportion travels: a serious share of whatever development capacity you have goes into keeping the seams working.
The three that get least attention
Strategic alignment is not about where your business is going — you settled that in the first pass — but whether the vendor is heading the same way. A vendor betting on a deep configuration layer asks for more implementation effort and gives you a system your own people can reshape. Excellent if you have an IT team that can carry that. A poor trade if you want the simplest implementation you can get and will adapt to the standard. Both defensible, not compatible with the same vendor.
The vendor is an organisation of people you will work with for a decade, and the people in the selection meeting are frequently not the people who will run your implementation. Ask to meet the second group before signature. Then decide where on the scale range you want to sit: a five-person supplier can fit perfectly and still leave you exposed, while a global vendor gives you resources, continuity and the experience of being one account among several thousand.
Implementation method is where large projects actually fail, and the axis most often reduced to a Gantt chart. What you are evaluating is whether the vendor can turn your operation into structured, testable requirements and then into a configuration that behaves the way the business really works — and who does that configuration work, now and in three years.
One question that fits in none of the columns
What the vendor is doing with AI runs across all five: rate of change strategically, how they build and support the software, how requirements and test scenarios get produced in the project, and what your own people see in the screens they use all day. The gap between vendors experimenting and vendors shipping is wide right now and invisible in a demo, so ask the specific version: what runs in production today at a named customer, and what is roadmap?
The test of a sound selection is not that all five were examined, but that the answers were compared in the same room. Set the bar from where you want to be. Score what you already have against it. Then make everyone else prove it.
The full treatment, with the complete set of questions and evidence per dimension, is in the white paper: How to run a WMS, TMS or logistics ERP selection.
Karel Van den Berghe is founder and CEO of Globis Software, a platform for logistics service providers handling complex cargo flows. These are the questions we use on strategic software decisions ourselves, and the ones we expect to be asked. Disagreement welcome.
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