ERP modernization is the most expensive and most commonly mismanaged IT program in mid-market companies. I've governed these programs across a $9B food processing company and multiple PE-backed manufacturers. The same five mistakes appear in almost every failed or overrun implementation.
Mistake 1: Starting with the software selection
Most companies approach ERP modernization by evaluating software first. This is backwards. Before you evaluate a single vendor, you need clean process documentation, a clear picture of your data quality, and an honest assessment of your change management capacity. Without these three things, no ERP selection process will give you useful information.
Mistake 2: Underestimating data migration
Data migration is the single most underestimated workload in any ERP implementation. Companies consistently allocate 10–15% of project resources to data migration when the real number is closer to 30–40%. Clean, structured, validated data is the foundation everything else builds on. When it's wrong, every downstream process is wrong.
Mistake 3: Customizing before going live
The instinct to customize the ERP to match existing processes before going live is understandable but expensive. Best practice: go live on standard configuration, learn the system, and then make targeted customizations where the business case is clear. Companies that try to replicate their existing processes in a new system miss the entire point of ERP modernization.
The goal of ERP modernization is not to automate how you work today. It's to redesign how you work, with better tools.
Mistake 4: Under-resourced change management
Technology is 30% of an ERP implementation. Change management is 70%. The system will work. The question is whether your people will use it correctly, consistently, and without finding workarounds that recreate the problems you were trying to solve. Change management is not a communication plan. It's a structured program to shift behavior — and it needs dedicated resources and executive sponsorship from day one.
Mistake 5: No post-go-live governance
The implementation ends. The governance should not. The companies that get full value from their ERP investments are the ones that treat go-live as the beginning of a continuous improvement program — not the end of a project. This means dedicated business ownership of the platform, a clear enhancement process, and regular review of whether the system is delivering the business outcomes it was implemented to achieve.
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