An SAP EWM rollout is not a software project. It is a change to how every shift in your warehouse opens, what every operator touches, and how every pallet is recorded. The firm you choose to land that change will be in your business for between nine and twenty-four months, and the consequences of that choice are still on your P&L three years later. The interview matters more than the proposal.
The questions below are written for a one-hour pitch session. They are deliberately designed to separate firms that live on the warehouse floor from firms that live in the slide deck. There is no trick to them, and there is no single right answer. What you are listening for is the tone, the specificity, and the willingness to be honest about the boring parts.
The five questions you should ask in every pitch.
1. Who is actually on my project on Monday?
The most common failure mode of large integrator pitches is the senior team in the room, and the bench on the floor. Ask for named consultants for the EWM stream, in writing, with CVs. Ask when each named consultant rolls off another engagement to start on yours. Ask what happens if one of them is unavailable. If the answer is “our resourcing team will assign equivalent talent”, that is a non-answer. A specialist firm will tell you who is on it, and will be uncomfortable committing to people they cannot deliver.
2. Walk me through your last three EWM go-lives, including the one that did not go well.
The willingness to talk about a rollout that struggled is the single best predictor of how a firm will behave when yours does. Every working consultancy has a go-live that did not go the way the slide deck described. Listen for whether they can tell you, honestly, what they would do differently. If the firm cannot produce an example, either they are too new to the practice, or they are not telling you the truth.
3. Show me where you used standard SAP EWM where another firm would have written custom code.
Z code is the arrogance tax. The competitive advantage in any IT solution should be about fifteen per cent of the system, the parts that genuinely differentiate your operation. The remaining eighty-five per cent should land inside standard SAP EWM, because that is the part that SAP itself will continue to support, patch, and evolve. A specialist firm will be able to point to specific gap-fill solutions delivered in standard EWM that another firm would have customised. If the firm leads with how much custom code they can write, ask why.
4. How do you measure success at the end of hypercare?
The honest answer is not “the system is live and stable”. The honest answer is something like: labour-per-pallet is within X per cent of the pre-go-live baseline; outbound peaks are running at Y per cent above plan with no overtime; operator-reported defects are below Z per shift; the integrator's ticket volume is trending down week on week. If the firm cannot name the KPIs they will be measured against, they are not committing to the outcome. They are committing to the work.
5. What will you tell me if my readiness is not where it needs to be at go-live minus four weeks?
The wrong answer is “we will manage the readiness gap through the cutover plan”. The right answer is “we will recommend a move on the date, and we will tell you why in writing, with the operational evidence”. Outcome focused firms will defend a date change in a steering committee. Budget-focused firms will quietly compress the readiness item and present the resulting wobble as a change-management issue.
Three follow-up questions for the EWM stream lead.
Once the partner has spoken, ask to spend fifteen minutes with the consultant who will actually run the EWM stream. The firm's reaction to this request is itself a data point.
a. Tell me about the RF flow you designed on your last rollout, by screen.
You are not looking for a perfect answer. You are looking for whether the consultant talks about screens, taps, exceptions, and operators, or whether they talk about “the inbound process” in the abstract. The first is a floor practitioner. The second is a configurator.
b. Where on that last rollout did the system and the floor disagree, and how did you resolve it?
This is the System vs Reality test. A practitioner will have specific examples. They will be able to tell you which side they made bend, and why. If the answer is that everything went to plan, either the rollout was unusually clean or the consultant did not have visibility into the parts that were messy.
c. What does your hypercare look like at week six?
The honest answer should describe a tapering presence on the floor with measurable handover criteria, not a sudden drop on a calendar date. Hypercare that ends on a Friday is usually hypercare that ended too early.
What a specialist sounds like.
A specialist will say no to scope they cannot defend. They will be willing to refer you to a different firm for the parts of the programme that sit outside their practice. They will have a point of view about how the system should behave that they will defend in a steering committee. They will use the words “operator”, “RF”, “tap”, “exception”, and “shift” more often than they use “workstream”, “orchestration”, or “centre of excellence”. They will be slightly less polished and significantly more specific than the firm sitting next to them.
A specialist position is defined by what it refuses, not just what it sells.
How Luminar would answer these questions.
Honestly. If you want, you can put this list to us on a thirty minute call. We will tell you who would be on your engagement, walk you through the last three EWM rollouts including the one that was the hardest, show you where we used standard SAP EWM to close gaps that another firm would have written code for, and tell you the KPIs we would commit to at the end of hypercare. If after that conversation we are not the right firm for your work, we will say so, and we will name two firms we would recommend instead.