Common questions about ERP consultancy
Choosing, implementing, and optimising an ERP system is a major business decision – one that raises a lot of questions.
Below we’ve gathered answers to the most common queries we hear from organisations exploring ERP and business systems. If you’d like tailored guidance, our team is always happy to discuss your unique requirements.
Once you have made the decision to seek outside help from an ERP consultant, it is of course important to make the right choice. Key things to consider include:
- Are they unbiased in their views as an independent ERP consultant?
- Do they have a clear, structured but flexible approach?
- How will they recharge for their services – fixed priced or time & materials?
- What experience do they have – both sector and size of other clients?
- Can you work together and consider them as a trusted business partner?
Dependent upon the type of ERP consultancy services you require, we will provide a detailed breakdown of our costs in a formal proposal. We will then only ever charge for the actual time required and notify with you in advance should the scope and costs be likely to change. We also recognise that other business priorities may change and so we are flexible in our approach and can adapt to your own availability.
Where you have asked us to support an ERP selection, every ERP project is different, and software vendors and their partner set their own pricing. Our role is to help you define realistic budgets, compare total cost of ownership across vendors, and avoid costly missteps during selection. This means you go into implementation with clear expectations and fewer surprises.
An independent ERP consultant provides unbiased guidance to help businesses select, implement, and optimize ERP systems without vendor preferences.
We focus on helping our clients select the most suitable ERP system and implementation partner from the multitude of solutions available.
We accept no payment or referral fees of any kind and looking back at recent ERP selection projects, we’ve found that for the last 50 clients, we’ve helped them select over 25 different solutions from a mix of vendors and implementation partners.
Our team isn’t made up of career consultants – we’ve each worked in industry across a wide range of functions and sectors. That means you don’t need to spend time explaining how your business operates. We understand the challenges you face and can focus straightaway on your specific issues. This practical experience shortens Discovery and ensures our guidance is grounded in real-world business practice. And because we’re vendor-neutral, our advice is always focused solely on what’s right for your organisation.
We have the privilege of seeing your business for the first time and looking in from the outside gives us a unique perspective. We can spot opportunities and alternative ways of working that are often difficult to see from within the business. When processes have been in place for years, it’s natural for them to feel ‘the way things are done.’ We help challenge that thinking constructively, bringing an agnostic view of what’s possible. At the same time, your teams are focused on keeping the business running day to day. We take on the legwork of requirements gathering, vendor evaluation, and process analysis, so you get the benefit of fresh insight without overloading your people.
We’ll work with you to define the scope of your new system and agree which functions should be included. Through workshops with your functional leads, we capture both your current ‘as-is’ processes and your future target operating model. This forms the foundation for a clear Statement of Requirements (SoR), ensuring vendors understand exactly what you need and giving you a solid basis for comparison.
The right approach depends on both your current situation and your future strategy. During Discovery, we explore the factors that matter most: the time, resources, and capability you have available; whether external pressures influence your timeline; and how ambitious your organisation wants to be. For some, a transition—moving to a new system with minimal change—reduces risk in the short term. For others, a full transformation is the opportunity to reimagine processes for long-term growth. We help you weigh these options so you can choose the path that best fits your business.
That’s a great starting point. Reviewing processes in advance is valuable, but system selection and implementation still require structured requirements gathering, vendor evaluation, and change planning. During Discovery, we’ll review your existing work, validate what’s already documented, and quickly identify any gaps or open questions. Our team brings practical industry experience across finance, manufacturing, supply chain, warehousing, projects, and customer-facing processes—so we can add both insight and structure to the discussions. This ensures your process reviews translate directly into actionable ERP requirements and a smoother path into vendor engagement.
We don’t replace your project manager – we strengthen their position. By providing ERP-specific expertise, we can support them with direct advice, bring an objective view of project progress, and highlight risks or dependencies that might otherwise be missed. Most importantly, we ensure best practice is followed throughout, giving your project manager the backing they need to deliver a successful go-live.
We use a structured, evidence-based approach. Vendor responses to your Statement of Requirements (SoR) are scored against agreed criteria, giving an objective comparison from the outset. From there, we help you shortlist the most suitable options and invite vendors to demonstrate how their solutions meet your needs in practice. This combination of scoring and live evaluation gives you confidence that the final choice is the best fit for your organisation.
We don’t have preferred vendors or solutions. Our role is to remain completely vendor-neutral and focus on what’s right for your organisation. Once we fully understand your processes and future requirements, we use our experience to create a longlist of the most suitable vendors for you to consider. From there, we help you narrow the options through structured evaluation and demonstrations, ensuring the final choice is evidence-based and aligned to your business goals.
You don’t need to prepare everything up front—we’ll guide you through it. As part of the selection phase, we run workshops with each functional area to understand your current processes and systems. From this, we create clear documentation, including workflow diagrams where relevant, and confirm any gaps, manual workarounds, or future requirements. This is then formalised into a Statement of Requirements (SoR), which gives vendors the detail they need to respond meaningfully and allows you to compare solutions on a like-for-like basis.
Yes. We’ll work with you to plan the timetable and scope of vendor demonstrations, and agree on a small, representative subset of your data that can be shared securely (with redactions if needed). We know that using your own data makes the demonstrations far more meaningful, showing how each system would perform in the real context of your business rather than through generic examples.
The timeframe depends on factors such as the size of your organisation, the complexity of requirements, and how many vendors are evaluated. Typically, the ERP system selection process takes around 3–4 months, though it can be completed more quickly if needed. Our structured approach ensures the process is efficient without cutting corners, so you can make a confident and well-evidenced decision.
Yes. We work alongside your chosen vendor to make sure implementation stays aligned with the requirements and outcomes agreed during selection. We can support you with process design, documentation, and testing, as well as providing guidance on project governance and change management. Our role is to give you confidence that the implementation is progressing smoothly and that your business priorities remain at the centre of the project.
Implementing a new ERP system is complex – we act as your partner, alongside your chosen vendor, to ensure the project stays on track. We provide structured project governance – tracking risks, dependencies, and progress against agreed requirements – while also focusing on the people side of change. By supporting communication, engagement, and adoption across your teams, we help safeguard your priorities and give you confidence that the implementation will deliver on time, on budget, and in line with your business objectives.
Technology is only part of the challenge – success depends on people adopting new ways of working. We can support you in the communication, engagement, and change planning from the start, so your teams feel involved and supported throughout your ERP journey.
Go-live isn’t the end of the ERP journey. We help you embed the system into daily use, review how it’s performing against your goals, and identify opportunities for optimisation. This ensures your investment continues to deliver value long after implementation.
Data is often one of the biggest challenges in an ERP project. We help you develop a clear data strategy from the start – deciding what to migrate, what to archive, and how to cleanse and structure information so it’s fit for your new system. During implementation, we can provide guidance on testing and validation to ensure accuracy and integrity. Beyond go-live, we support you in reviewing how data is being used, helping you establish governance and best practice so your system remains a reliable source of truth.