ERP Consultation: What to Ask and What to Bring

An ERP consultation can be the most useful hour you spend on the whole project, or a polite sales pitch. Which one you get depends a lot on how you prepare.

Before the call: five things to gather

You don't need a requirements document. You do need enough to describe the business without hand-waving.

1. A rough picture of volume. Orders per day, number of SKUs, number of warehouses, number of people who'd use the system. Ballpark is fine.
2. Your current systems. Accounting package, eCommerce platform, any CRM, plus the spreadsheets that people would panic about losing.
3. The three things that hurt most. Be specific. "Inventory is a mess" is less useful than "we oversell on Amazon twice a week because stock syncs overnight".
4. Anything unusual. Consignment stock, lot tracking for recalls, make-to-order with long lead times, multiple companies or currencies.
5. Constraints. A budget range if you have one, a date that really matters (a financial year-end, a new warehouse opening), and who has to sign off.

Questions worth asking the consultant

These questions sort experience from enthusiasm fairly quickly.

"What would you not do in our situation?" A good consultant has opinions about what to leave out. If everything is possible and recommended, be careful.

"Tell me about a project that went badly." Everyone who has done this for a while has one. What matters is whether they learned something specific from it.

"Who would actually do the work?" The person on the sales call is not always the person configuring your system. Ask to meet the delivery lead.

"How do you handle data migration?" Vague answers here are a red flag. Data is where timelines slip. Our data migration guide explains what a solid answer covers.

"What happens after go-live?" Ask about the first month-end close, support response times and what upgrades cost.

Warning signs

• A demo before they've asked about your business
• Fixed prices quoted in the first conversation for a project they don't understand yet
• "Our ERP can do everything", especially for a niche requirement
• No mention of your team's time commitment
• Pressure to sign before discovery

What a good first session gives you

By the end of a useful consultation you should have:

• A view on whether you need an ERP now, later or not at all
• One or two candidate systems with honest reasons for each
• A sense of the main risks (usually data, integrations or availability of key people)
• A rough range for budget and timeline. See how much ERP implementation costs for how those ranges are built.
• A clear next step, which is often a short paid discovery

If you walk away with none of that, the call was a pitch.

Try us

We offer a free first ERP consultation. Bring the list above and we'll give you a straight answer, even if it's "you don't need us yet". If you're still at the research stage, how to choose an ERP consultant is a good companion read.