Before you buy an ERP: five questions to answer first
Most failed ERP projects were lost before a line of code was written. These five questions are where they went wrong.
An ERP is just one private system where the parts of your business that currently live in separate spreadsheets, notebooks and WhatsApp threads finally talk to each other. That is a genuinely transformative thing to own, and it is also the category of project most likely to quietly fail. Almost always for reasons that were visible on day one.
1. What is the one thing that hurts most?
Not the list of everything you would like. The single process that costs you the most money, time or goodwill right now. Projects that start with "we need to digitise the business" drift for months. Projects that start with "we lose two days a month reconciling deliveries against invoices" ship something useful in weeks, and the rest follows because people can see it working.
2. Who actually has to change how they work?
Software does not adopt itself. If the storekeeper has kept the same ledger for eleven years and nobody has spoken to them about this, the system will be worked around rather than used, and you will end up maintaining both. The people whose habits have to change should be in the room during discovery, not informed at launch.
3. Where does the data live today, and is it any good?
Every ERP project meets this moment: the existing data is inconsistent, duplicated and partly wrong, and cleaning it is a real job that nobody budgeted for. Find out early. It is much cheaper to discover it during discovery than during migration, and it sometimes changes the sensible order of the modules.
4. What should it refuse to do?
Permissions are usually treated as a late detail and they are actually the design. Who can approve a purchase order above a threshold? Who can see salaries? Who can void an invoice, and does that leave a trace? Answer these at the start, because retrofitting a permissions model onto a working system is one of the more expensive things you can ask for.
5. What happens when you outgrow it, or us?
You should be able to get your data out in a standard format, on any given Tuesday, without asking anyone’s permission. You should have the source and know where it is hosted. A system you cannot leave is not an asset; it is a subscription with extra steps.
The sensible shape
Start with one or two modules that address the thing that hurts most. Get them into real hands and let them be used badly for a while — that is how you learn what the specification missed. Add the next module once the first is genuinely part of the routine. A system assembled this way is used; a system delivered complete after nine months of silence usually is not.