The Question to Ask Before You Pick an ERP

Before choosing an ERP system, most companies ask which platform fits their vision. Few ask whether they have the people to keep it standing after go-live.

Eleven years ago, we faced this decision directly. A design engineer on our team pitched building a custom ERP on an open platform — elegant, scalable, fully ours. It was a compelling pitch. Then our CFO asked one question: who maintains this? We had no IT staff. Zero. Nobody in the room volunteered.

We went with a boring, black-box SaaS platform instead. The engineer who’d championed the custom build wasn’t happy about it. But that system is still running today, without a single patch crisis or upgrade disaster in over a decade.

The platform that matches your vision is almost never the platform that matches your depth bench. Before you evaluate features, evaluate your capacity to own and maintain whatever you choose. That answer should come first, not last.

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Lee Stout