1. Your company’s strategic objective
- This is by far the most important criteria. Acquiring an ERP may impact your company for many years or even decades in some cases.
- Are you a company who wants to reach a new milestone revenue-wise and reach the next level?
- Are you a startup whose growth driver is the increase in the number of clients or number of products? Can you double your manufacturing output within the next 3 to 5 years?
Without a long-term strategic vision for your company, acquiring an ERP is a risky decision.
2. Your industry’s best practices
- If you want to stay at the top of your industry, it is important that your company has at its disposal tools that enable it to execute the best practices in the industry.
- Keep your eyes open on the tools used by similar companies and other professionals in a similar position as yours.
3. The ERP’s total cost of ownership
Given that acquiring an ERP is a long-term business decision, take the following elements into account:
- Your ERP’s yearly subscription cost
- The licence costs
- Will the ERP expertise be kept internally or requiring external intervention?
- What will be the cost of upgrades?
4. The ERP implementation project budget
Implementation and licence costs can vary greatly, even within their own market segment. You must determine a threshold with specific numbers. To achieve this, you need to have a clear idea of the future state of your company compared to your pre-ERP organization.
Some implementations demand that you put away several members of your operational teams to work with a partner for a certain amount of time.
Other implementations may last only a few working days without using much of your human resources. Nevertheless, change management and training need to be taken into account in your ERP implementation budget.
5. The ERP implementation partners
It is very important to select the right ERP implementation partners for your project.
The composition of an ERP implementation team is very flexible.
You could choose certified partners recognized by the ERP or CRM vendors (SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft, HubSpot, etc).
The main factors to take into account :
- The ERP implementation experience
- The implementation team knowledge
- The existing client references in the industry and in the geography