Every vendor in enterprise data claims domain expertise. Most of the time that means they hired a consultant who visited a plant twice, or they read the same three industry reports everybody else read. The claim is cheap. The difference it makes is not. Practitioner-built means something narrower and harder to fake. The 2am test The people who designed the alert have been woken up by that alert. They know what it feels like to get paged for a threshold that was set by somebody who never had to answer it. That experience shows up in the product as restraint. Fewer alerts, set at levels a human can act on, with enough context attached that the first thing you do is not go looking for context. Why the demo is where you find out Ask what happens when the data is wrong. Not missing, wrong. A tag that reports the previous shift’s value because a PLC did not repoint after a changeover. A vendor who has run an operation answers immediately, because it has happened to them. A vendor who has not will tell you about data quality tooling. It changes what gets built first Teams who have run operations build the boring things first: the record, the reconciliation, the audit trail. Teams who have not build the dashboard first, because the dashboard is what demos well. You can see the order of construction in any product if you look at which parts are deep and which parts are thin. What to ask for Ask who on the team has carried a pager for a production system. Ask what they got wrong in their last deployment and what they changed because of it. The answers are more useful than any reference call, because they are harder to rehearse. The honest limit Practitioner experience is not a substitute for understanding your specific operation. It shortens the learning curve. It does not remove it. What it buys you is a team that knows which questions matter, which is most of the value in the first ninety days.