How to Choose an ERP System: A Practical Guide for Growing Companies

Choosing an ERP is one of the more expensive decisions a growing company makes, and one of the hardest to reverse. Once finance, stock and sales all run through one system, changing your mind means moving the whole business again.

Most of the work in a good decision happens before anyone sees a demo. This guide sets out the steps in order.

Start with the problem, not the product

Write down what is actually going wrong, in plain language. Reports that take days. Stock figures nobody believes. Approvals lost in messaging groups. Invoices typed twice. Then turn the list into three or four outcomes you could check a year from now. Those outcomes become the test every vendor has to pass, and they keep a long feature list from taking over the decision.

Follow one order through the business

Take a real order and walk it from the first enquiry to the cash in the bank. Note who touches it, which tool they use and where information gets retyped. An afternoon of this reveals more than any requirements template. It shows the exceptions, the workarounds and the steps that exist only in someone’s head, and those are the things a demo will never show you.

Decide what to standardise

Some processes are the same in every company. Accounting has little to gain from being unusual, and bending it away from standard practice makes every future upgrade harder. Other processes are the reason customers choose you. Customise those and accept the standard way for the rest. Companies that try to reproduce every existing habit in the new system tend to pay the most for the least.

Compare systems on what costs you later

Feature lists look alike. These differences show up after you have signed:

• Fit: how much of your process works without custom development
• Change: what it takes to add a field, a report or an approval step next year
• Integration: whether it connects to the tools you are keeping, and how
• Reporting: whether managers can get answers without asking IT
• Your data: how you can export it, and in what format, if you ever leave
• Local needs: Arabic screens and documents, and your tax and e-invoicing rules
• Licensing: how the price changes as users, modules and branches grow

Judge the implementer as hard as the software

The same ERP can succeed in one company and fail in another, and the difference is usually the team doing the work. Ask who will actually be on your project, which companies in your sector they have worked with, how they handle data migration and what support looks like after go-live. Speak to a past client if you can, and ask what went wrong and how it was handled.

Plan the data move early

Data migration is the step companies most often underestimate. Customer lists contain duplicates, product codes have drifted and opening balances have to reconcile exactly. Decide early how much history you really need, name someone in each department to own their data, and run at least one full test migration before the real one.

Roll out in stages

Switching every department on the same day concentrates all the risk in one weekend. A staged rollout lets one area settle before the next begins, usually starting with finance and inventory because so much depends on them. Where the numbers matter most, run old and new side by side for a period, so your team can check them before relying on them.

Budget for the whole project

The licence is only one line. A realistic budget also includes:

• Implementation and customisation
• Cleaning and migrating data
• Integrations with your other systems
• Training, and time away from the day job for the people involved
• Support and changes after go-live

Your own staff’s time is the cost most often left out. Someone who knows how the business really works has to be available throughout.

A final check before you sign

You are ready to choose when you can answer these questions:

• Which three or four outcomes will tell us this worked?
• Who inside the company owns this project, with the authority to make decisions?
• Which of our processes are we willing to change?
• What happens to our data if we leave?
• Who do we call the week after go-live?

Opream delivers ERP with TechNova Information Technology L.L.C, and together we have completed 11 rollouts across manufacturing, retail, healthcare and other sectors. If you are working through this decision, see how we approach ERP or talk to us about your business.