Quick answer: A clean OEE software selection runs 12 weeks end to end: 2 weeks of requirements, 7 weeks of evaluation and hidden-cost diligence, 3 weeks of pilot, negotiation, and contract. Anything longer is the procurement department padding the calendar. Anything shorter usually skips the hidden-cost work and surfaces nasty surprises in month 4.
Key takeaways:
Seven weeks. Three vendors. One scoring spreadsheet. That is the entire frame.
Week 3, shortlist three vendors. Read three independent reviews each. Our shortlist trio for European mid-market is usually two enterprise names (e.g. FORCAM or TrakSYS) and one challenger (e.g. Fabrico). No more than three. Three lets you compare. Five lets the procurement office stall.
Weeks 4-6, structured demos. Send each vendor the same five-question script before the demo. (1) Pull live data from a sample work center via our PLC tap or webcam. (2) Show the downtime event timeline and reason-code tree. (3) Trigger an alert that hits a real phone. (4) Walk the ERP write-back path for scrap. (5) Show the price calculator with our pilot scope. If a vendor refuses, drop them.
Week 7, reference calls. Three customers each. Same five questions: deployment time vs promise, support response latency, breakage frequency, hidden cost surprises, would they buy again.
Weeks 8-9, the hidden-cost checklist. The single most useful page in this entire playbook. Things every OEE sales deck omits:
Walk this list with each vendor and request signed price quotes in writing. The €20-50k/year swing between vendors is almost always hiding in items 4-10. See the standalone hidden costs checklist for the version we hand to procurement.
This is where most selections stall. Three weeks, three milestones.
Week 10, pilot decision. Pick the winner. Sign a 30-day pilot agreement covering one line at the bottleneck. Pilot must include: live data capture, one CMMS integration, one alert path to a real phone, and the operator board live during one full shift. If a vendor refuses a paid 30-day pilot, that is your answer.
Week 11, commercial negotiation. Five levers most buyers leave on the table:
Week 12, contract, kickoff, runbook. Three things must be in the signed contract: pilot success criteria (named KPI thresholds), data ownership clause (your data exits with you in CSV/Parquet if you leave), and SLA on support response (4-hour business hours is fair).
Day 1 of Week 12, schedule the pilot kickoff. Day 5, write the pilot runbook. The team that runs the pilot is the team that operates the system, not consultants who hand it off in month 6.
If you stick to the 12-week window, you walk out the other end with a working OEE pilot on the bottleneck line, a signed contract that controls future cost growth, and an internal team that already operates the tool. Plus everybody else in the plant got back to their actual job two months earlier than the typical SAP-modeled selection allows.
Related deep-dives: OEE hidden-cost checklist · When is OEE software justified? · OEE + Epicor integration · Best real-time OEE monitoring.
Before any vendor demo, sit down for two hours with your plant director, maintenance lead, and one production supervisor and write a single page. Not a 40-page RFP. One page.
The page covers six things:
The exercise is uncomfortable because it forces decisions before you have data. That is the point. Vendors love unfocused buyers because they sell every feature. Focused buyers buy the right tool.
If you cannot get the requirements doc to one page, the problem is not the page, it is that the team has not aligned on what they actually need.
How long should OEE selection actually take? 12 weeks for a single plant pilot. 16 weeks if you have a complex multi-site rollout to plan. Anything longer is either consultants padding the budget or internal politics. Anything shorter usually skips the hidden-cost work.
Should I run an RFP? Only if you have to for compliance reasons. The one-page requirements doc plus structured demos beats a 60-question RFP for everything except heavily regulated industries (pharma, defense, aerospace).
What if my line has no PLC? Computer-vision OEE handles that. A camera plus a model trained on your line. Read the field guide. Deploys in days, not months.
How do I shortlist when I have not seen the market? Read three independent reviews of three categories: enterprise (FORCAM, TrakSYS, AVEVA), mid-market (Fabrico, etc.), and your existing ERP's native OEE module if any. That gives you the shape of the market in two evenings.
What is the single biggest mistake buyers make? Buying the demo, not the operating system. Demos showcase the prettiest charts. The work is in shift handover, alert routing, CMMS write-back, and per-line scaling, none of which show well in a 30-minute presentation. Insist on a paid pilot.
The 12-week version of OEE selection works because it forces the work into the right order: requirements before demos, structured comparison before reference calls, hidden-cost diligence before negotiation, paid pilot before signature. Anything else is the procurement office adding ceremony to a decision that was always going to be made by the plant director.
Want to test our process on your bottleneck line? Fabrico runs paid 30-day pilots that start with the one-page requirements doc and end with a signed contract or a clean exit. Book 25 minutes.
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