When Your ERP Becomes Fiction

An ERP goes live. There’s a launch party. The implementation partner sends a polished closeout email. And somewhere between go-live and today, the bill of materials becomes fiction. Not all at once — it never happens that way. Engineering makes a change. Someone updates the drawing but not the system. A revision gets buried in email. A substitute part becomes tribal knowledge. Production adjusts on the floor to keep shipments moving. Over time, the business drifts away from the ERP.

Now the CFO is staring at margin reports that don’t match reality. The COO is watching the floor build one thing while the system says it’s building another. And the ERP that took 18 months to implement is confidently reporting data that stopped being accurate months ago.

This isn’t an ERP problem. The system is doing exactly what it was told. It’s a change control problem — while the implementation got executive attention, ECO discipline became a process document nobody revisited after go-live. That gap is where margin goes to die.

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Lee Stout