One of the key challenges for businesses is knowing when to upgrade their systems. Cloud-based solutions provide opportunities to integrate your different requirements with ease. This is great for smaller businesses with growing revenue as it allows you to easily let your job management system send invoices to your accounting system. To succeed with this change, getting the right system for your requirements is one challenge. The 4-box model with the vendor development team is another major hurdle. To keep control of your ERP project, the best approach simplifies the lines of communication and reduces the chance of misunderstandings. Companies can build their business activity around these solutions. Usually, areas such as Sales, HR, and financial reporting use tools such as Excel and PowerPoint to store, extract and produce reports. This makes sense when the company is small and one or two people can manage the daily activities. As your business grows, you may see signs that your current technology creates a bottleneck for growth. Your processes require several manual steps to manage your suppliers and their deliveries. Sometimes it might be hard to fill orders as you do not have real-time inventory data. Perhaps matching your sales projections to customer revenue takes the finance team some days to produce the reports. One option involves investing in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. This type of solution brings your technology processes onto a single platform. When considering an ERP solution the first step should be to identify what functionality the system must support. While this may sound obvious, you will want to compare your requirements to the capabilities offered by the ERP vendor. This means you must document your business processes to make it clear what the ERP system must support. You will use these processes to support your vendor selection process. ERPs can provide you with functions such as order management, management accounts, and integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Before deciding on the best solution for your business, you need to research the candidates. You should assess if the ERP has the features to support your business processes and is sufficient flexibility for your unique business model. Sites like Capterra https://www.capterra.co.uk/ offer a product comparison service that allows you to research the costs and capabilities on the market. You can use their website to build a shortlist of potential solutions that fit your budget and requirements. My preference at this point is to book a live sales demo. This lets you ask questions about the processes you want to implement. If the product cannot meet your requirements out of the box, you may need to invest in consultants to deliver your functionality. When you find a strong candidate, you should ask the sales team what the total cost is to build and run the ERP solution. The more bespoke your ERP, the higher the cost of implementing and maintaining your solution. Clarify what the vendor will charge to support the implementation. Make sure this is separate from the vendor charges to run your ERP. The vendor should provide you with an estimate of the total cost of ownership for their product. This should include training your team to use the software and the process for releasing product upgrades to you. Make sure that you understand the terms of the proposed contract to avoid surprises after implementation. One of the biggest costs of an ERP implementation is developing bespoke solutions for your business. This option creates the greatest amount of risk as you need the vendor and their team to deliver functionality that supports your business processes. Vendors may insert their customer representative between you and their product development team. This means that you send your changes to the rep who in turn sends the request to the project team. There is likely to be a project manager and a set of developers involved in your request. This 4-box model creates a stream of messages flowing from end-to-end between the parties. Often each one adds their view of the discussion about the requirement. This results in confusion which leads to wasted time and effort for all parties. The outcome will be an expensive ERP solution that does not meet your needs. There are some steps you can take to resolve this challenge and make sure that all parties hear the same message. Before starting the project, agree on how you will manage the project with the vendor team. This will state when you meet and who from the vendor needs to attend. This should include the project manager and lead developer. This avoids the temptation to rely on the customer relationship manager to communicate the change. Keep control of the project by creating and managing the project plan. Developing and delivering an ERP solution is complex. Put a plan in place to get the ERP that boosts your business.