Why ERP Projects Go Over Budget and Behind Schedule — and How to Avoid It

Given how predictable these failure patterns are, and how expensive they become once they're baked into a signed contract and an in-flight project, a growing number of CFOs and boards now commission an independent risk assessment before a project starts, and sometimes again at key milestones during implementation — rather than relying solely on status updates from the systems integrator actually doing the work, who has an obvious incentive to describe progress more favorably than an outside party might. This is exactly the gap firms like Orpington Technologies are built to fill: a structured, evidence-based readiness score across the variables that actually predict outcomes — governance, change management, testing discipline, data migration readiness, integration readiness, and go-live strategy — giving a board a defensible, independent number rather than a reassuring one from whoever benefits from the project continuing as planned.

Budget and timeline problems get most of the executive attention, but a project can hit every deadline and still fail if the people who are supposed to actually use the new system never really adopt it. That's the subject of the next article: change management, and why the software side of an ERP project is often the easier half of the job.