How long will an ERP project take?

How long will an ERP project take?

Companies that install ERP do not have an easy time of it.
Don’t be fooled when ERP vendors tell you about a three- or six-month average implementation time.
Those short (that’s right, six months is short) implementations all have a catch of one kind or another:
The company was small, or the implementation was limited to a small area of the company, or the company
used only the financial pieces of the ERP system (in which case the ERP system is nothing more than a very
expensive accounting system).

***To do ERP right, the ways you do business will need to change and the ways
people do their jobs will need to change too. And that kind of change doesn’t come without pain. Unless,
of course, your ways of doing business are working extremely well (orders all shipped on time, productivity higher than all your competitors, customers completely satisfied), in which case there is no reason to even consider ERP.

The important thing is not to focus on how long it will take—real transformational ERP efforts usually run
between one and three years, on average—but rather to understand why you need it and how you will use it to improve your business.

Success is simple!

Achieving success in your ERP implementation will be the result of choosing the
right application, surrounding yourself with the best people and making decisions
that are informed by common sense and the experiences of the thousands of other
companies that have gone before you. Just remember that everyone from the application
vendor to the implementation consultant is trying to sell you something, and it
is up to you to perform the due diligence to make sure what they are saying is true
and that selecting their products or services is in the best interest of you and your
company. The more you immerse yourself in the process and the more questions you
ask, the better results you will achieve.