ERP
The ERP was supposed to fix this.
Instead the weekly call has more people on it than progress, go-live has moved twice, and the team that has to live in the thing has quietly stopped attending. We have been inside one of these — on your side of the table — and it is fixable.
The symptom
A project everyone attends and nobody drives.
It looks like diligence from the inside: a steering committee, two project managers, a proper RACI chart. But the spec was written by people who do not do the work, from interviews with people too polite to say "that's not how it actually happens here." Eighteen months later, the software arrives configured for a company that exists only in those meeting notes.
We lived through an implementation like this on the buying side, and it nearly broke the business attached to it. The software was not the villain. The structure was: too many people, too long a loop, a spec aging faster than it could be built.
Where the money goes
Eleven people, two years, one weekly call.
An ERP implementation that should cost far less routinely balloons, and the line items are people, not licences:
- 2Project managers, one per company, reconciling two versions of the plan.
- 3Full-time staff on scoping, QA and UAT. We were these three.
- 6Directors and executives billing time whether or not the project moves.
- 104Weekly status calls over two years, each one starting with a recap.
That is coordination overhead. It is the thing we compress — and, to be equally clear, the only thing. Change management, training and the data work only your team can do still take the time they take.
Price the weekly call itself.
The sliders start at the room we sat in: eleven people, two years. Set them to your project — the one you're in, or the one being pitched — and this is what the meetings cost before a single module is configured.
Your numbers
What it computes to
The cost of coordinating, alone
$274,349
Meetings, prep and recap only — before licences, configuration or a line of code.
Person-hours spent in the room
2,286 hrs
4.33 weeks per month. This is the number we shrink by shrinking the room and writing the spec from inside the operation.
What we do
Shrink the room. Write the spec from inside.
Implementation, run lean
We work inside your operation before anything is configured, so the spec describes how the work actually happens. Fewer people in the loop, decisions in days instead of steering-committee cycles.
Module-by-module go-lives
The module bleeding the most goes live first and starts paying back while the next is built. No big bang, no two-year wait for value, no spec aging in a drawer.
Data migration paths
The unglamorous half of every implementation: what maps, what gets cleaned, what gets archived, and who owns each — planned like the critical path it actually is.
Integration seams
The ERP joined to the tools that stay — storefront, field systems, banks — so it becomes the book of record instead of one more island to reconcile.
Rescue engagements
A stalled project taken from ninety percent done in eleven places to actually live in one, then the next. Usually the first act is cancelling a standing meeting.
The honest verdict
Sometimes the answer is "you don't need an ERP; you need a book of record and three integrations." We will say it, with the arithmetic, even though it shrinks the project.
What it costs and how long
Fixed phases. First module live in months.
Every engagement is quoted as fixed phases after the free day: a module, its migration, its integrations, live. You always know what the next phase costs and what it delivers before committing to it, and each phase pays back before the next begins.
What we take off the bill is the standing army — the parallel project managers, the two-year meeting, the coordination layer that costs more than the software. What stays on the bill, honestly, is your team's time for data cleanup, training and adoption. Those are the parts that cannot be compressed, only respected.
What it looks like
The first month of a rescue.
It starts with a day inside the operation — not the project. We watch how orders, inventory and money actually move, then read the spec against what we saw. The gap between those two documents is usually the whole story of why go-live keeps moving.
Then the room shrinks. Standing meetings get cancelled or cut to the people who decide; the eleven-person weekly becomes a short call that ends when the decisions do. Each module gets a one-page spec restated in present tense, and the module bleeding the most gets picked — not the one closest to "done," because ninety percent done and unused is worth exactly nothing.
By the end of the month there is a cadence a stalled project never has: something small went live, somebody's week got better, and the next phase has a fixed price attached. Momentum, it turns out, is mostly subtraction.
Why us, on this specifically
We were three of those eleven people.
Scoping, QA, UAT — we did those jobs, full-time, on a large implementation, while also running the business it was supposed to serve. We approved the change orders. We watched the spec drift from the operation it described. There is no version of this project you can describe to us that we have to imagine.
That experience is the entire design of how we implement now: the smallest possible room, the spec written from inside the work, and modules going live while they are still true.
Questions we actually get
Fair questions, straight answers.
Which ERP vendors do you work with?
We are vendor-agnostic, and deliberately so. The failure mode we fix is coordination, not vendor choice: the same product succeeds or balloons depending on how the implementation is run. We will work with what fits your operation, or with what you have already bought.
Can you rescue a project that is already underway?
Yes, and it usually starts the same way everything does with us: a day inside. Rescue in practice means shrinking the room, restating the spec against how your operation actually runs, and getting one bleeding module live instead of eleven modules ninety percent done.
Do we actually need an ERP?
Sometimes no, and we will say so even though it costs us the project. A surprising number of mid-market companies need a proper book of record and three integrations, not an ERP. The free day exists precisely to answer this question with evidence instead of a sales pitch.
How long does an implementation take with you?
First module live in months, not years, because we go module by module against present-tense truth instead of staging a big bang against a stale spec. What stays on the critical path is your side of the work — data cleanup, training, adoption — and we will not pretend otherwise.
Why do ERP projects get so expensive?
Because of who sits in the room and for how long, not because of the software. Two project managers, dedicated scoping and QA staff, directors billing time whether or not the project moves, a weekly call for two years. The software licence is often the smallest line on the bill.
The next step
Start with the free day.
One day inside your systems, real optimisations delivered, and a written diagnosis. No invoice, no obligation, no slide deck. It is the fastest way for both of us to find out if there's a project here.