That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do the same things as other companies instead of having everything bespoke.
I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution
the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out of Shopify (or x system) daily, and you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".
But they don't try to "buck the system" just for the sake of it.
Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible.
You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life. It makes it hard for them not just in IT but also to hire new people or replace retiring ones. Only Bob knew this process.
What makes the clients we work with great and unique and what I love is the products they make or the problems they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on thier core value and core skills and not random accounting process X Y or Z.
I work specifically with small and medium businesses too, and can echo that sentiment! I'd love to know more about what you do. Love working with SMBs but don't know a lot of other people in that space.
Its nice. It's certainly not high faluting as a lot of HN jobs but I make good money for where I live, our clients are mostly regional but a lot of the 50 states have customers over the years. Mostly we work on implementing and servicing ERP systems. Our differentiator is our skillet in integrations and holistic problem solving. Since the ERP sits in the middle of almost every IT venn diagram, we run into new tech on a weekly basis.
Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or payroll/bookkeeping addons.
Especially when the processes are beholden to certification authorities (say the FAA, FDA, etc) because the processes has to be approved and cert'd from the agencies. That's a fun one to unravel and co-ordinate getting changed in a timeframe keeping higher managements super optimistic timeframe that they decided to commit to, say the board, on.
> most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it.
This is insane cope. We make technology to assist end users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.
It's not really anyone saying "you're doing the task wrong", it's more like "you're doing it only so slightly differently that we need a few months to write customizations for it. We'll send you the bill".
Those big ERPs are not really blank canvases, but when you need those micro-customizations in the wrong place, they can become one.
End users involved in the integration don't really want to learn new processes or even do things slightly different, as they know that changing process often involves burning a lot of political capital and they often lack awareness to know that "just using the ERP the way it's intended" is cheaper. And consultants are experts in finding a chance to perform those micro changes. It's a perfect marriage.
I understand your point, but that's not how things work.
If you source the right ERP you will be presented with procedures and processes that have been streamlined and optimized leveraging previous experiences of literally hundreds of businesses. Smaller and larger than yours. It's an error to dismiss the standard solution without deep consideration.
Any process into a good ERP (e.g. managing a deposit payment, managing stock, documents transformation, uniqueness of product codes, and so on) is battle tested and may be ready to solve issues that at the moment your company in not seeing, but perhaps will have to face with the growth of the next five years and in five years perhaps you'll see the reasons why things were setup that way into the ERP.
I have been happily humbled more than once by that.
Check how things are supposed to work into your ERP, understand them and comply. That's how to have a functioning ERP in your company. Or just don't buy it and go for excel, it's cheaper (but just at the beginning, be warned).
Just to add... a lot of processes are very defined. I know HN loves to startups that reinvent the wheel but things like GAAP are pretty much the same workflows in any biz. AP, AR, SO, POs, etc.
A cope with what? Thats literally correct. The tool was made to replace 5 assistants, accountants and paper pushers. There's a design to this ginormous system that works best when you lean into it.
Not really though. We make technology to make SYSTEMs/Processes work, not individual tasks. Take ERP to an MRP level (manufacturing resource planning). It doesn't matter how it works best for Bob, we need to be able to have the part Bob schedules/orders from vendors/makes/QAs/builds from lower level parts feed what they feed when needed in a way that we can consistently/correctly plan, and that follows possible certification authorities requirements/pre-approved processes. This gets especially complicated on say an aerospace production line that has in the high five figures of different parts, with complex individual build configurations with each component in configurable items having it's own lead time, and where everything is JIT because otherwise you would have to sit on inventory levels worth multiples of what the entire company is worth, and every individual item/lot/etc needs to be tracked in perpetuity.
I've noticed that the same applies to any large inflexible platform, such as the public clouds.
If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll be fine, just like millions of other customers.
If you try and make the cloud work like your old data centre platform, then you'll have a bad time.
I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now everything is more difficult, slower, and just all-round bad. But they "had" to do it. (Narrator: No, they didn't.)
The problem is it is often very expensive to adapt other components to fit the inflexible platform.
In your example, the customer may have had software that depended on the routers having some functionality that the cloud native routers didn't. Sure if they had designed for that cloud from the beginning it wouldn't be a big deal. But now, that $2M might be less than the cost of changing all their other systems to work around the limitations of the cloud native router. I've seen situations play out like that a few times.
That kind of logic seems to make sense at first, but just confirms my point: trying to change IPv4 to suit you is a fools errand. Change what you do to hit ordinary bog-standard IPv4 instead and miraculously you’ll have fewer impediments.
A random state government department has no "business needs" that require custom IPv4 routing technology that isn't supported by the two biggest public clouds. Any such need is imagined, or an outright error.
In this particular case they were sold a product that serves one purpose: multi-cloud solutions across international boundaries where no single telco can connect all of the data centre locations.
Their handful of locations are all in one city and well-connected by multiple telcos because... they're a state government, not a multi-national corporation. They're blocked by the constitution from expanding inter-state, let alone internationally. That would be a literal act of war.
That didn't stop the vendor's sales team showing slides with titles like: "What if you need to expand into the Chinese market?".
E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
A wonderful statement straight out of ERP's sales guys (or other folks on the same side dependent on keeping the cash flowing). FYI what we trash here are typical SAP-level migrations and all horrible stories that always come with it, maybe your tiny company does things better but then its a different story in a different market.
I have yet to meet a single company which works like ERP are designed to work. This is their edge over competition, their reason for existence on brutal market. And ERP wipe that out, with the most expensive wiper you can imagine, while selling various bullshit left and right, and constantly lying to given company how everything is fine and under control.
Truly, a way to kill a company. The fact that some survived it all to tell a story just shows how resilient whole such org is to such a massive stressor that ERP migration always is.
They sell first and foremostly a lie - that you can have cover-it-all system just like competition, to match your unique way of working, without suffering tremendously, fit like a glove out-of-box (when reality is exactly opposite). It just never works, more like hammering a concrete glove on your progressively more disfigured hand, while being told how rosy your future will be.
I worked in consulting for over a decade, and... yeah. When people migrate from one system to another, they try to make the new system work exactly the way the original system does, especially if the original system is homegrown. That lack of flexibility tends to be responsible for more than half the cost (and time span) of the migration.
There's also the related failure mode of deciding you're going to fix all your other system problems as part of the migration, bloating the scope and creating too much complexity. Just do the necessary stuff, migrate, and then go back and fix the nice to haves.
I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration.
It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts.
There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't want to change how they work (because change is often stressful), and the person paying the bills is not getting the full picture.
If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software that integrates with it.
Right. I’ve spent weeks creating automations in a business I knew very well, that would most likely save a few minutes per month for a low salary employee.
But the RFP said I had to do it, and the customer insisted that I follow the letter of the RFP, rather than hit the high value parts of the project.
The two problems with this are that the cost of automation far exceeded the possible future cost of the manual process, and working on this automation took oxygen away from the stuff that would help people.
That’s a great point. Very often the cost of automating something in those large systems is larger than the cost of a minimum wage person spending a couple hours a day clicking stuff…
6 years ago I was called as a contractor by the company I work for as they were desperate that their ERP was just a money drain and despite the money was not functioning at all.
Fast forward 6 years. I'm a manager at that company, responsible for business processes and it systems.
The ERP works great, everybody's happy.
Secret recipe: dismantle custom company processes.
Culture change: realize that company's not that special and don't need special ERP recipes.
Takeaway: if the ERP standard is set up in a certain way, probably there's a very good reason underneath that setup.
