Software demonstrators enable the transfer of theoretical concepts into industrial practice and therefore areused in various research areas. Although the stages of the development of a software demonstrator arealready described in literature, it lacks an examination of fundamental decisions and characteristicsthroughout the development process. Characteristics, such as transparency, hold across all research areasand industries. A specification and extension depends on the individual use case. This paper describes thenecessary decisions regarding the framework of a software demonstrator for data analysis in the field ofproduction logistics and the characteristics applicable before and during the actual implementation of thesoftware demonstrator. Key decisions are for example the design of the software architecture or the choiceof the programming language. The characteristics equal the requirements to a certain extent and relatedirectly to the users and to the application itself. Discussions with companies from a wide range of industriesrevealed underlying conflicts and diverse priorities in terms of the aspects of functionality. Especially thesize of the company seems to play an important role regarding the expectations of a software demonstrator.Therefore, the integration of potential future users into the development process of a software demonstratorpresents a major advantage. It reduces the number of cycling stages at the end of the development processand increases the willingness to use the software demonstrator after its completion. As the objectives behindsoftware demonstrators can highly differ in the field of production logistics, concepts of demonstrators andsoftware engineering and the related objectives were examined. A demonstrator for determining the orderprocessing strategy serves as an example of how these different approaches interrelate.