How to Choose a Distribution Management System: The RFP I Wish I'd Had

By Sufyan · 2026-07-04 · 4 min read

Last month I sat in a Karachi office watching a sales ops head flip through a 340-page vendor proposal. He looked at me and said, "Sufyan, I don't even know what half of this means."

Honestly, that's the whole problem with DMS software evaluation right now.

Vendors send bloated PDFs. RFPs get copied from consulting templates written in 2014. And six months into implementation, everyone's blaming everyone else because nobody asked the right questions upfront. I've seen this play out at a beverage company in Riyadh, a personal care brand in Manchester, and at least four distributors in Lahore. Same script every time.

So let me share what actually belongs in a distribution management system RFP if you're an FMCG company in 2025. Not the fluffy stuff. The questions that separate real vendors from demo magicians.

Start with your actual problem, not a feature wishlist

Here's the thing — most RFPs open with a company overview and then jump into 200 feature checkboxes. Wrong order.

Open your RFP with a one-page problem statement. What are you actually trying to fix? Missed deliveries? Distributor stockouts you find out about three weeks late? Field reps punching fake GPS attendance from a chai dhaba? Write it down in plain language.

I worked with a snacks brand in Jeddah that had 62 distributors and no visibility into secondary sales below the town level. That was their problem. Not "we need a comprehensive DMS." When they rewrote the RFP around that specific gap, they cut vendor responses from 14 down to 4 serious contenders in two weeks.

Be specific about numbers too. How many SKUs? How many outlets? Peak orders per day? If you're doing 8,400 invoices a day at month-end and a vendor's system was benchmarked on 2,000 — you'll find out in production, which is the worst place to find out.

The questions vendors don't want you to ask

Most RFP templates skip the uncomfortable stuff. Don't.

Here's what I'd put in every FMCG distribution management system RFP:

On architecture and offline mode. Ask: "Describe exactly what happens when a field rep loses connectivity mid-order in a basement supermarket." Not "do you support offline?" Every vendor says yes. But how they sync, what conflicts they resolve, whether stock allocations hold — that's where the truth lives. In Oman and interior Sindh this matters daily.

On distributor onboarding. "Walk me through onboarding a new distributor with 12,000 legacy SKUs and 3 years of historical data. How many days? Whose responsibility?" If they say "our team handles it," ask for a fixed-price statement of work. Vague answers here become six-figure change requests later.

On integrations. Don't ask "do you integrate with SAP?" Ask "show me a live customer where you push invoices to SAP S/4HANA every 15 minutes and handle failed postings without manual intervention." There's a big difference between "we have an SAP connector" and "we run this at scale for a beverage client with 47 distributors."

On pricing at scale. Get pricing at 100 users, 500 users, and 2,000 users. Get it for year 1, year 3, and year 5. Ask what happens when you add a new country. This is where the $5/user platforms and the $50/user enterprise suites split — and where I've seen brands lock themselves into contracts they can't afford to grow into.

On exit. "If we terminate in year 2, how do we get our data out, in what format, and how long does it take?" A confident vendor answers this in one paragraph. A nervous vendor sends you to legal.

The scoring model that actually works

Most evaluation scorecards are useless because everything's weighted equally. A 4/5 on "user interface aesthetics" ends up counting the same as a 4/5 on "handles 10,000 concurrent orders."

Weight your criteria before you see any demos. I usually recommend something like:

Then — and this is the part people skip — send the scorecard to three of your operational people who'll actually use the system. A regional sales manager in Dubai will score differently than a CIO in London. Both scores matter. Average them.

Also, reference calls. Ask for three references in your industry, your region, and your size band. Not the vendor's favorite reference from a different vertical. When I'm helping brands evaluate Zivni against FieldAssist or BeatRoute or Repsly, I tell them the same thing: call our customers, call their customers, ask the same five questions to both. The gap in answers tells you everything.

One question I love for reference calls: "What did you think you were buying versus what you actually got?" The answer is almost never the feature list. It's usually about support responsiveness, or how the vendor behaves when something breaks at 11pm on a Thursday.

A few things I got wrong early on

I used to think the biggest DMS mistake was picking the wrong vendor. It's not. The biggest mistake is running the RFP process without involving the people who'll live in the software daily.

I've watched a procurement head in Kuwait pick a system based purely on TCO. Field reps refused to use it. Adoption at month 6 was 31%. The "cheaper" system cost them a year of secondary sales visibility.

So before you send that RFP out, do one thing. Take your draft and spend 90 minutes with a regional sales manager, a distributor's operations person, and one field rep. Ask them what's missing. They'll tell you in the first 10 minutes.

And if you want a starting template to work from, email me — happy to send the one we use with prospects at zivni, whether or not you end up choosing us. Fair's fair.

What's the one question you wish you'd asked your current DMS vendor before signing?

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