What Companies Should Consider Before Replacing an ERP
Eight questions to answer before an ERP replacement project starts — scope, data, processes, integrations, people, and how success will be measured.
Replacing an ERP is one of the few IT decisions that touches every department at once. The projects that go well are usually the ones where a handful of questions were answered honestly before the first demo.
1. What problem is actually being solved?
“The system is old” is not a business case. “We cannot open a second warehouse without hiring two more people to reconcile stock” is. Write the constraint down in operational terms — it becomes the acceptance criterion later.
2. Which processes are in scope?
An ERP replacement can cover everything from order intake to production planning. Scope it explicitly: which flows go live first, which follow, and which stay in their current systems for now. A phased scope is easier to validate than a complete one.
3. How good is the data?
Master data quality determines a large share of the effort. Before the project starts, check for duplicate partners, products with inconsistent units, price lists nobody maintains and stock that has not been counted recently. Cleaning is cheaper before migration than after.
4. What history do you really need?
Full document history is comfortable but expensive to migrate and to validate. Distinguish between what you need to operate (open documents, balances) and what you need for reference (older history, which can often remain accessible in the legacy system read-only).
5. Which integrations are mandatory on day one?
List every exchange with the outside world — banks, marketplaces, couriers, accounting, fiscal reporting — and mark which must work at go-live. Anything mandatory needs a design, an owner and a test with the real counterparty long before cut-over.
6. Who will do the work on your side?
Implementation projects need decision-makers with authority, key users with time, and someone who can say no to scope that does not serve the goal. If those people are not allocated, the timeline is not real.
7. What is the deployment and support model?
Cloud or local, who operates it, what response time is expected, how updates are applied, and what happens when something breaks at month-end. Agree these before signing, not during the first incident.
8. How will success be measured?
Define measurable criteria in advance: reconciled balances, a full sales cycle executed by users, month-end closed in the new system, a specific report produced without spreadsheets. “Everyone is happy” is not a criterion.
Questions to ask any supplier
- What exactly will the analysis phase deliver, and what does it cost?
- How is migrated data validated, and by whom is it signed off?
- What happens if a customisation turns out to be infeasible?
- What is the rollback plan at cut-over?
- Which of the promised integrations are already implemented, and which would be built for us?
A supplier who answers these plainly — including where the answer is “we cannot know before the analysis” — is telling you how the project will actually run.
The realistic expectation
An ERP replacement does not remove work; it moves it. In a good project, the work moves from reconciling systems to running the business. That is the outcome worth planning for, and it is measurable.
If you want to see what an analysis phase looks like in practice, request a demo built around your current system rather than a generic tour.