Practical writing on ERP readiness, implementation, support, training, governance, testing, data migration, recovery, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Here's an uncomfortable question worth asking honestly: if a customer called right now and asked whether a specific item was in stock, at which location, and when it could ship — how confident would the answer actually be?
When an ERP programme fails publicly, the question that follows is always the same: how did the board not know? The assumption is concealment. The reality is usually more mundane and much harder to fix.
Most small and mid-sized companies negotiate good supplier pricing at some point — a volume discount here, better payment terms there — and then quietly lose a meaningful chunk of that value because nobody in the building has an easy way to make sure people actually buy from the negotiated supplier at the negotiated price.
"On track" and "ready" are different claims. These are the checks that tell you which one you are looking at.
Ask a controller at a growing company what they actually do during the first week of every month, and you'll usually get some version of the same answer: chase people for numbers. Chase the warehouse manager for a final inventory count. Chase sales for the last few invoices that haven't been entered yet. Chase whoever owns the corporate card spreadsheet.
Most ERP programmes do not fail at go-live. They fail months earlier, quietly, while every dashboard still reads green. This guide explains what readiness actually is, how to measure it, and where the measurement usually goes wrong.
There's a particular moment a lot of finance directors at growing companies will recognize. It usually happens during a board meeting or a bank renewal, when someone asks a question that should have a simple answer — what did we spend on freight last quarter, or which customers are actually profitable — and the honest response is "give me a few days." Not because the data doesn't exist, but because it's scattered across QuickBooks, four spreadsheets maintained by four different people...