Enterprise systems & ERP

An ERP selection is an operating-model decision wearing the costume of a software purchase.

What I believe

When an organisation implements an ERP it is deciding how it will operate: how work is sequenced, what an approval means, when revenue is recognised, what counts as a finished job. Those are business decisions. The software merely makes them permanent and difficult to reverse.

This is why the most valuable period in any ERP programme is before the contract. Afterwards you are optimising within someone else’s assumptions.

What tends to go wrong

Requirements written as feature lists. A feature list can be satisfied completely while the business gets worse, because it describes what the software should contain rather than what the organisation should be able to do.

Customisation used to avoid a decision. Every expensive customisation I have examined closely turned out to be an organisation paying a developer to postpone an internal argument.

Where I have done this

Enterprise-wide deployments in real estate and large-scale development, including the first such deployment in one organisation’s history, and group-level systems work across real estate, construction, healthcare and industrial operations.

How I work on this, and on what terms, is set out under advisory.