ERP implementations place substantial demands on an organization. They affect core processes, financial reporting, data, internal controls, and the daily responsibilities of employees across multiple functions. When an implementation goes poorly, the consequences can include escalating costs, operational disruption, delayed reporting, and a system that never delivers its expected value.
Despite companies’ best efforts, those outcomes remain uncomfortably common. A 2025 survey reported that 70% of ERP implementations fail to deliver their expected benefits. Many of the problems that surface during implementations originate much earlier, when the business case is vague, requirements are poorly governed, or vendor claims are accepted without sufficient insight.
However, the following steps can help organizations make a more informed ERP decision and entering their implementation with fewer unresolved risks.
1. Define the business case before evaluating software
Begin with the specific operational and financial results the organization expects the ERP to produce. These may include accelerating the financial close, shortening order-to-cash cycles, reducing manual work, strengthening controls or improving the quality and timeliness of management reporting.
Each objective should be measurable and validated by the process owners responsible for the work. This provides a foundation for distinguishing requirements that are essential to the business from departmental preferences and attractive features with limited value.
Without that discipline, the requirements process can preserve outdated practices instead of defining how the organization should operate in the future.
2. Make vendors prove process fit
Vendor demonstrations are typically built to present the platform under favorable conditions. They may show broad functionality without revealing how the system will handle complex transactions, exceptions, approval paths or reporting requirements.
Give each vendor the same scripted scenarios based on actual business processes and require a live demonstration. Stakeholders should evaluate the results against criteria established before the demonstrations begin, including process fit, reporting, controls, integration capabilities, user experience and cost.
This creates comparable evidence and limits the influence of presentation quality, stakeholder preference or newly introduced features.
3. Expose data and integration complexity early
Data conversion and integrations are frequent sources of delay because their complexity may not become apparent until implementation is underway.
During selection, identify every system that must exchange information with the ERP, including banking, payroll, business intelligence, warehouse management, point-of-sale and operational platforms. Connections involving banks, service providers or other external parties may require longer development and testing timelines.
The organization should also assess the data it intends to migrate. Duplicate vendor records, inconsistent identifiers, inactive accounts and an unnecessarily complex chart of accounts can materially increase the work required. Data cleansing, mapping and validation should have defined owners, resources and deadlines before the implementation plan is finalized.
4. Establish governance before difficult decisions arise
ERP selection requires sustained executive sponsorship and clearly assigned decision rights. The governance model should identify the executive sponsor, steering committee, process owners and escalation path.
It should also determine who will resolve tradeoffs when business units have competing requirements or when the organization must balance functionality, cost and timing. Establishing this authority in advance reduces delays and prevents unresolved disagreements from carrying into implementation.
Stakeholder participation also contributes to adoption. Employees are more likely to support the selected platform when they have helped define requirements, evaluate scenarios and understand the rationale behind the decision.
5. Challenge the need for customization
Modern ERP platforms provide significant flexibility, but recreating every legacy process can increase implementation costs and make future upgrades more difficult.
Each proposed customization should be evaluated based on the advantage it creates, the availability of a standard configuration and the possibility of changing the underlying process or policy. The analysis should also include the long-term cost of testing, maintaining and upgrading the modification.
A customization should move forward only when its business value is clear enough to justify that continuing obligation.
6. Model the complete cost and risk profile
Licensing represents only one component of the ERP investment. A credible total cost of ownership model should account for implementation services, integrations, data conversion, hosting, internal project resources, training, support, upgrades, enhancements and eventual platform exit.
The implementation partner should receive the same scrutiny as the software. Its industry knowledge, platform experience, project management discipline, proposed team and post-go-live support model can materially affect the outcome.
Security and compliance requirements also need to be evaluated before contracting. Role-based access, segregation of duties, approval workflows, audit trails, privacy requirements and data residency can be expensive to correct late in the project.
Know Whether You Are Ready to Enter the Market
Before contacting vendors, an organization should be able to explain what the ERP must accomplish, how competing platforms will be evaluated, who will make decisions and where the most significant cost, data and adoption risks may arise.
Uncertainty in these areas weakens negotiating leverage and allows critical decisions to be deferred until changes are more difficult and expensive.
Planning an ERP Selection or Replacement?
UHY helps organizations assess ERP readiness, build the business case, define process-based requirements and objectively evaluate software vendors and implementation partners. Our professionals also support data planning, governance, internal controls, change management and implementation oversight.
Contact UHY before beginning vendor outreach to identify unresolved risks, strengthen your selection strategy and build a more reliable path from evaluation through go-live.
Share this article
Contact Our Consulting Team
Complete this form to discuss how to identify unresolved risks and strengthen your selection strategy.
By submitting this form, you agree to be contacted by UHY.