Every mid-size business has an ERP system. Every mid-size business has a list of complaints about that ERP system. Those complaints never get addressed because fixing ERP is the least glamorous project in the company, and because whoever greenlights the project has to weigh "fix the ERP" against "ship a new product." The new product always wins.
The result is that the ERP rots. Not functionally, in the sense that it stops working. Functionally it still works. But the operational overhead around it grows every year. Workarounds pile up. Excel sheets bridge the gaps. People develop rituals for how to get reports out. The business runs, but inefficiently, and the inefficiency compounds.
We have walked into ops teams where the "month end close" takes three weeks. Three weeks of every month, the finance team is reconciling data that the ERP should have been keeping clean. That is a third of the working year spent on janitorial work. The CFO knows. The CEO probably does not.
The first thing we do in an ERP engagement is map the workarounds. Where are the Excel sheets. Where are the manual reconciliations. Where are the double-entry steps. Where does data get re-keyed from one system to another. Every one of these is a place where automation can pay for itself in weeks.
The second thing we do is build adapters. Most ERPs have APIs. Many of the workarounds exist because nobody built the bridge between the ERP and the other system where the data lives. Once the bridge is in place, the Excel sheet dies, and nobody misses it.
The third thing is dashboards, but not the vanity kind. The ones that catch exceptions. Inventory mismatches. Invoice aging. Orders stuck in a status they should not be in. Most ERP dashboards are full of charts and devoid of action. Ours are the opposite. Short lists of things that need attention today.
The end state is not a new ERP. That would cost more than the whole project is worth. The end state is the same ERP with the right layer on top, doing the boring work, so the finance team and the ops team can do the work that actually requires a human.