Your ERP probably isn’t the problem.
We’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.
A lot of businesses we speak to already have plenty of software. An ERP, CRM, finance package, production systems, Microsoft 365 and usually a collection of spreadsheets that have appeared over the years.
Most of those systems aren’t necessarily bad.
The problems often sit between them.
Someone exports a CSV because the report they need is not available. Customer information is copied from one system into another. Production maintains its own spreadsheet because the main system does not quite match what happens on the factory floor. Documents are assembled manually from information held in several places.
Each workaround tends to be reasonable when it first appears. It gets a job done and lets the business carry on. The difficulty comes later, when the workaround becomes part of the normal process and one member of staff is the only person who knows how it all fits together.
By then, the obvious conclusion is that the big system in the middle must be wrong.
The core system may still be doing its job
An ERP is usually responsible for some fairly important things: customers, products, orders, stock, purchasing, finance or production records. Replacing it is not a small decision.
It can mean moving years of data, changing established processes, retraining teams and accepting a long period of disruption. The replacement may solve some problems, but it can also leave the business rebuilding the same reports and workarounds around a newer, more expensive system.
Sometimes replacement is justified. A system may be unsupported, insecure, unable to cope with the scale of the business or fundamentally mismatched with what the company now does. But age, frustration and a large spreadsheet folder are not enough on their own to prove that the ERP is the cause.
Often the core system still holds the right records and performs its main role perfectly well. The business has simply changed around it. New services have been added, customers expect different information, teams work in different ways and reporting has become more demanding. The weak points are the handovers between the system of record and the people doing the work.
That’s usually a much more useful place to start.
Fix the gap, not everything around it
Once the actual gap is understood, the answer is often smaller than an ERP replacement.
It might be an integration that moves information automatically instead of asking somebody to re-key it. It might be a small application around one awkward part of production, a clearer interface for a team that only needs a focused view, or a portal that exposes useful information without giving everyone access to the core system.
It might mean replacing a spreadsheet that has quietly become business-critical, generating documents from the records already held, or connecting operational activity back to the system of record so that both remain accurate.
Our work with Stockdales is a practical example. Their operational platform retrieves the day’s delivery schedule from the customer system, then gives administrators and drivers the tools needed to manage the work as it happens. The driver app records arrivals, loads, weights and returns, including when mobile coverage is poor, while the wider platform keeps a searchable history. The useful work happens around the schedule already held elsewhere, without asking staff to copy it into a separate process every morning.
EYJ’s factory management system addresses a different gap. Complex project specifications change over time, and the latest information needs to reach the factory floor quickly. The system gives management a structured project record and provides staff with current information on screens and tablets, along with a way to report progress or flag delays. It is a specific operational tool built around the way production actually works.
The Stockeld Park Christmas tree ordering and fulfilment system shows how broad one of those operational gaps can become. Their process has to join customers, forecasts, confirmed orders, tree stock, yard preparation, payments, collections, multi-location deliveries, pallets and documents. The value is not in describing it as a replacement for every system the business uses. It is in giving office, yard and administration teams one structured workflow for a particular operation, with the safeguards and reporting that work requires.
These are different projects, but the principle is consistent: understand where the operational record stops matching the real work, then solve that part deliberately.
Development is not always the answer
A sensible review should be allowed to conclude that the existing system needs configuring better. A module may already exist but never have been set up properly. An off-the-shelf product may cover the requirement without custom development. The process itself may need changing, particularly if software is being asked to preserve a step that no longer serves a useful purpose.
Sometimes the right answer is to do nothing. A mildly irritating manual task performed twice a year may not justify a project at all.
Bespoke software makes sense when the problem matters enough and off-the-shelf software doesn’t really fit. That judgement should come before any decision about technology. The aim is to remove a real operational weakness, not to find a reason to build software.
The same applies to AI. It has created useful new ways to deal with unstructured information, documents and organisational knowledge. But many operational problems still need boring, reliable integration and conventional software.
Sometimes AI is useful. Sometimes an API is useful. Sometimes the answer is simply getting two systems to exchange the information they should have been exchanging for years.
Look at what has grown around the system
Before starting a replacement project, follow a real piece of work through the business.
Look at where information is exported, copied, retyped or checked. Find the documents assembled by hand and the spreadsheets that have become unofficial systems. Notice where staff leave the main software to finish the job, and where progress depends on knowledge that has never been written down.
That does not excuse a genuinely unsuitable ERP. It gives the business better evidence for deciding what needs to change. If the core system is the problem, the case for replacing it will be clearer. If it is not, the business can avoid the cost, risk and disruption of changing something that still works.
Before replacing the big system in the middle, look at everything people have built around it to get their jobs done.
The problem might be much smaller than you think.