How should the pilot be scoped?
Narrowly, and on your worst data. Pick three real products, including the one with the messiest supplier documentation, and ask the vendor to load them and produce one finished output: a dossier section, an SDS, a specification. Timebox it to two weeks.
A pilot on clean demo data tells you what the software does when nothing's wrong, which is never the state of a real product record. What you're buying is the behaviour in the awkward cases.
