February 15, 2023
ERP solutions
The ERP market has matured, with thousands of software options and vendors available. Since an ERP is not a system you can easily replace every five years, selecting the right one is an important decision. And even though experienced ERP consultancy can streamline ERP selection, it still requires a company’s active involvement.
In this guide, we cover all aspects of ERP selection to help you make a sound choice and ensure successful ERP adoption.
To help you choose an ERP solution that will bring maximum benefit to your organization, we’ve compiled this guide that walks you through every step of the selection process.
ERP selection is all about negotiations. If you want it to be successful, you should know what you need precisely, clearly understand the offered capabilities, and imagine what you can eventually get.
Konstantin Pilkevich
Solution Consultant, Head of Itransition's ERP Center of Excellence
An ERP selection team is a group of employees (department managers, team leads, subject matter experts, shareholders, and partners) from different departments, business units, and locations. Their goal is to assist the ERP project team with software requirements and attend ERP vendor demos. Experts should be selected based on their competence, not job title, and should not be afraid to speak up and voice unpopular opinions. The team should also include employees who are quite familiar with your current processes and will use the ERP daily.
If there is no relevant experience in your company, you can consider hiring a professional consultant to help with ERP selection.
Note: If time allows, your company can encourage a wider discussion among employees and stakeholders. Another option is to delegate this decision to a smaller group of stakeholders who can drive consensus within limited timeframes and champion change.
We shortlist the main criteria for choosing ERP software regardless of a company’s size, industry, geography, user count, or technology landscape.
To find an enterprise resource planning platform with the most suitable feature set, you have to draw up a clear and comprehensive list of functional requirements defining the future solution’s modules (CRM, project management, procurement, marketing and sales, ecommerce, supply chain management, etc.). You can gather them across the organization, narrow them down to the most crucial ones, and approve them with key stakeholders. This document can be further used as a checklist for ERP platforms evaluation.
All platforms promise to satisfy your business needs. How to choose the right one?
Some of your decision-makers have already worked with a particular ERP. Do you need to use the same?
Not all employees are excited about ERP and may not want to use it after the implementation.
We’ve created a checklist of smart ERP software solution capabilities.