Choosing an ERP partner is one of the most consequential technology decisions a business makes. Get it right and you gain a system that works properly from go-live, a team that understands your business, and a long-term relationship that delivers value as the business evolves. Get it wrong and you face a failed or partial implementation, a system your team doesn’t trust, and the cost — financial and operational — of either fixing it or starting again.
The frustrating reality is that most businesses approach this decision with less rigour than they apply to hiring a key employee or selecting a major supplier. This post covers the criteria that actually matter — and the mistakes that are easy to make.
The Most Common Mistake: Evaluating on Price Alone
When businesses put an ERP implementation out for tender, the proposals they receive vary significantly in price. The instinct is to treat a lower price as a better deal. The problem is that ERP implementation pricing is not like buying a commodity — a lower quoted price almost always reflects one of three things: a smaller scope that will grow significantly during the project, less experienced consultants who will take longer and make more mistakes, or a template-based approach that does not account for how the business actually works.
The implementation fee is a small fraction of the total cost of a poor implementation. Finance team time spent on manual workarounds, data quality issues that corrupt reporting, re-implementation costs, and the opportunity cost of running on a system that doesn’t work properly — these are the real costs, and they dwarf the difference between a well-priced and a cheaply-priced implementation proposal.
What to Look For in a Partner
Demonstrated knowledge of your industry. Business Central is a broad platform. The correct configuration for a manufacturing business is substantially different from the correct configuration for a professional services firm or a distribution company. A partner who has implemented Business Central for businesses similar to yours will make better configuration decisions, ask the right questions, and anticipate the problems that arise in your type of business — rather than discovering them after go-live.
Fixed-price or clearly scoped engagements. Open-ended time-and-materials projects put all the cost risk on the client. A partner who understands the work well enough to price it with a fixed scope has done the thinking required to know what the implementation involves. That clarity should be visible in the proposal: a detailed scope document, named deliverables, explicit exclusions, and a milestone-based payment structure.
A clear approach to data migration. Data migration is where most ERP implementations encounter their worst problems. How the partner proposes to handle it is one of the most revealing things about their competence. A good partner will conduct a data assessment early in the project, identify data quality issues before migration begins, and include a reconciliation process to verify migrated data against the source system before go-live. A partner who treats data migration as a simple export-and-import task has not done enough implementations to know how badly it can go.
Post-go-live support that is part of the engagement, not an afterthought. The weeks immediately after go-live are when a new system is most fragile. Users are learning, edge cases surface, and questions arise that were not anticipated during testing. A partner who treats go-live as the end of the project rather than the beginning of a stabilisation phase has the wrong model. Ask specifically what post-go-live support looks like, who provides it, and how quickly issues are resolved.
References you can actually speak to. Any partner can provide a written testimonial. Ask for reference clients in a similar industry that you can call directly, without the partner on the line, and ask them specific questions: how close was the actual cost to the quoted cost? How long did the go-live take versus the plan? What did post-go-live support look like? Were there any significant problems, and if so, how were they resolved?
Red Flags to Watch For
Some warning signs are consistent across bad implementations. Be wary of a partner who is unable to give you a specific scope document — only a broad statement of work. Be cautious of a partner who promises a go-live timeline that seems implausibly short without a clear explanation of how they will achieve it. Avoid partners who cannot name specific consultants who will work on your project — if the work is being delivered by whoever is available at the time, the experience level is unpredictable.
Finally, be sceptical of any partner who does not push back on your requirements. A good partner will challenge your assumptions, flag configuration decisions that will cause problems later, and occasionally tell you that what you want is not the best approach. A partner who agrees with everything is either inexperienced or more interested in winning the contract than in delivering a good outcome.
Our Approach at Finsys Apps
We scope every implementation with a fixed price and a detailed deliverables document. We conduct a data assessment before any configuration begins, and we include a post-go-live stabilisation period as a standard part of every engagement. If you would like to discuss how we approach a specific type of implementation, get in touch.
