Choosing and Implementing an ERP: Lessons From the Front Line
October 2022
For many growing businesses, the decision to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is one of the most significant — and most frequently mishandled — operational investments they will make. Done well, an ERP transformation can provide the data foundation, process discipline, and operational visibility that enables a business to scale confidently. Done poorly, it can consume years of management time, cost multiples of the original budget, and deliver systems that nobody uses or trusts.
Having led ERP implementations across multiple businesses, including multi-subsidiary NetSuite deployments spanning UK, US, and EU operations, this article sets out the most important lessons I have learned.
Start with Process, Not Software
The most common mistake in ERP selection is starting with a software evaluation before understanding what the business actually needs. Vendors are highly effective at demonstrating the capabilities of their platforms under optimal conditions. What they are less forthcoming about is the gap between the standard product and your specific business requirements — and the cost of closing that gap.
Before approaching any vendor, document your current processes end-to-end: order to cash, procure to pay, inventory management, financial close. Identify the pain points, the manual workarounds, and the data gaps. This process documentation becomes both your requirements specification and your implementation blueprint.
The Total Cost of Ownership Question
Software licence costs are typically the smallest component of total ERP expenditure. Implementation services, data migration, customisation, training, and ongoing support frequently exceed the initial licence cost by a factor of three to five over a five-year period. Any business case that does not include a realistic total cost of ownership is not a business case — it is a budget underestimate waiting to be discovered.
Data Migration is the Hard Part
Every ERP project team underestimates the complexity and effort required to migrate data from legacy systems. Customer records, supplier records, open orders, historical transactions, inventory balances — each of these requires extraction, cleansing, transformation, and validation before it can be loaded into the new system. The quality of what goes in determines the quality of what comes out.
Allocate more time and resource to data migration than you think you need. Then allocate more again.
Integration is Not Optional
An ERP that sits in isolation — not connected to your e-commerce platform, your logistics systems, your banking, your reporting tools — is not delivering its potential value. The real power of a modern ERP is as a data hub: a single source of truth that feeds every system and every decision in the business.
Building integrations properly, with appropriate error handling and monitoring, requires investment. But the alternative — manual data transfers, duplicate entry, and reconciliation work — is a permanent ongoing cost that is easy to underestimate when you are focused on go-live.
Change Management is 50% of the Work
Technology implementations fail because of people, not because of software. If the people who are supposed to use the system do not understand why it is being implemented, do not trust it, and have not been trained effectively, adoption will be poor — and a poorly adopted ERP is worse than no ERP, because it creates the illusion of data without the reality.
Invest in change management as seriously as you invest in the technical implementation. The return on that investment will be measured in user adoption, data quality, and the speed at which the business realises the benefits it set out to achieve.