What twenty years in ERP taught me about implementations that stick
The projects that succeed rarely fail on the technology. Here's what actually separates an ERP rollout that lasts from one that quietly unravels.
I've been part of enough ERP implementations — as a founder, a consultant, and the person who gets called when things go sideways — to notice a pattern. The projects that last and the projects that quietly unravel almost never differ on the technology. They differ on a handful of unglamorous things nobody puts in the sales deck.
It's a people project wearing a software costume
The software is the easy part. The hard part is that an ERP system encodes how a business actually works — and most businesses don't fully agree on how they work until you make them write it down. Half of a good implementation is diplomacy: getting finance, operations and the warehouse to agree on a single version of the truth.
Clean data beats clever configuration
Every failed migration I've seen was, underneath, a data problem someone hoped would fix itself. It never does. The unglamorous work of cleaning, mapping and reconciling data before go-live is the single highest-leverage thing you can do. Budget for it generously; it will still take longer than you think.
Decide who owns it after go-live — before go-live
Systems don't fail on launch day. They fail six months later, when the person who understood the configuration has moved on and no one owns the thing anymore. Name that owner early, and give them time to actually learn the system while the consultants are still around.
Resist the urge to rebuild your old system
The most expensive words in any project are "but that's how our old system did it." A new ERP is a chance to drop the accumulated workarounds of a decade. Take it. Every bespoke customisation you add is a cost you'll pay again at every upgrade, forever.
None of this is exotic. But the projects that respect these four things tend to still be running happily years later — and the ones that don't tend to become the cautionary tale someone tells a consultant like me.