An ERP promises one place for everything: inventory, sales, purchasing, accounting and the reports that tie them together. When it works, managers stop chasing numbers across spreadsheets and start making decisions from a single, trusted screen.
When it doesn't, the company ends up paying for a system its team quietly works around, while the real work drifts back to Excel and WhatsApp.
The difference is rarely the software. It's the thinking that happens before anyone writes a line of code or signs a license. Here are the seven questions we ask every company before an ERP project, and why each one matters.
1. Which processes cost you money today?
Start with the pain, not the feature list. Where do orders get delayed? Where does stock disappear? Which reports take someone a full day to prepare every month?
Write these down in plain language. An ERP should remove specific, measurable friction, such as "we don't know real stock levels until the end of the month" or "invoices are re-typed from sales orders." If a module doesn't solve one of these problems, it can probably wait.
2. What must stay the way it is?
Every business has a few ways of working that are genuinely part of its advantage: a special pricing model, a fast approval path, a unique way of handling returns.
Many ERP projects fail because they force these into a generic template. List the processes you won't compromise on. They tell you whether an off-the-shelf system will fit, or whether you need something configured or built around you.
3. Who owns each piece of data?
If sales, the warehouse and accounting can all edit a product's price, nobody owns it, and the numbers will never match.
Decide early who creates and approves customers, products, prices and suppliers. Clear ownership is what turns an ERP from a shared spreadsheet into a single source of truth.
4. Which reports do managers need on Monday morning?
Work backwards from decisions. What does the owner need to see every week? Cash position, top-selling items, overdue invoices, stock that isn't moving?
Every report depends on data being captured correctly earlier in the process. Defining reports first reveals which fields are truly required at each step, and which are just noise that slows your team down.
5. Off-the-shelf, customized or built?
There's no universal answer, only trade-offs:
- Off-the-shelf is fast to start, but you adapt your processes to the software.
- Customized platforms fit better, but every customization has to survive future updates.
- Built around you fits exactly and grows with you, but needs clear requirements and a partner you trust.
The answers to questions 1 and 2 usually make this choice obvious.
6. How will you move your existing data?
Years of customers, products and balances live in spreadsheets, old software and sometimes paper. Migration is often the most underestimated part of the project.
Decide what actually needs to move (open balances and active items, rarely everything), who will clean it, and how you'll check it after import. Moving messy data into a new system just moves the mess.
7. What does "done" look like?
"Implement an ERP" is not a finish line. "Invoices are generated from sales orders with no re-typing, and stock is accurate every day" is.
Agree on a small set of outcomes for the first phase, launch, and let the team use it. Then add modules one at a time. Companies that try to switch everything on at once usually end up switching nothing.
Start small, grow in modules
The most successful ERP projects share one habit: they start with the process that hurts most, usually inventory and sales, prove it works, and expand from there. The team builds confidence, the data gets cleaner, and each new module lands on solid ground.
Where to go from here
If you answered these questions and found gaps, that's normal, and it's far cheaper to discover them now than after launch. This discovery step is exactly how we start every ERP engagement at GTech: we map how your business actually works, then recommend the smallest system that solves the biggest problems.
You can see our starting prices for ERP systems and business analysis on the pricing page, or tell us about your business and we'll help you think it through.
