Before You Sign the Contract, Ask These Six Questions

Most ERP programs don’t fail at the technology layer.

They fail because the organisation wasn’t ready for the technology — and nobody checked.

Not the vendor. Not the implementation partner. Not the steering committee. Everyone assumed someone else had confirmed the basics. Nobody had.

Here are six structural gaps I see repeatedly in organisations that are about to struggle with an ERP implementation. Not occasionally. Consistently. The programs that hit these conditions going in are the ones I later get called to help recover.

Fix these six structural gaps before signing ERP project

1. You have no business system owners.

Someone needs to own each system — not in an IT sense, but in a business sense. Who fully understands how this system serves the business? Who is accountable for ensuring it’s used correctly and kept current? If you can’t name that person for each system in scope, you are building on sand. The go-live will happen. The drift will start immediately after.

2. You haven’t identified who owns your data.

Data ownership is not a technical question. It is a governance question. Who in your organisation is accountable for keeping which data clean, accurate, and up to date? If that question produces silence or finger-pointing, your new system will inherit your old problems — and charge you a premium to do it.

3. You have no process owners.

An ERP implementation is, at its core, a process re-engineering exercise wearing technology clothing. If no one is accountable for end-to-end process flows — not just their own department’s slice, but the full flow — optimisation will never happen. You will go live with processes that look different on paper and feel identical in practice.

4. Your systems architecture is ad hoc or non-existent.

Every integration decision, every customisation, every workaround made during implementation adds weight to a structure that may have no blueprint. When architecture is missing or assembled on the fly, there is no standard to hold decisions against. The program becomes a series of local fixes with no one watching the whole.

5. Systems decisions are being made without discipline.

No business case. No options analysis. No proper project management. No handover documentation. No plan for continuous improvement post go-live. Each of these absences is survivable in isolation. Together, they produce a program that moves fast, looks active, and leaves nothing of lasting value when it’s done.

6. Speed and urgency are driving your decisions.

This one is the multiplier. When urgency is the governing force, the gaps above stop being visible. Due diligence feels like delay. Questions feel like obstruction. The vendor senses momentum and mirrors it back. Executives feel progress. The program drifts.

Urgency is not inherently wrong. But when it becomes the reason to skip the questions you should be asking, it stops being a condition and becomes a cause.

None of these flags require an expert to spot. They require someone willing to ask uncomfortable questions before the contract is signed — when the answers still have the power to change something.

That is the work. It is not glamorous. It rarely makes you popular with the vendor or the implementation team. But it is the difference between an ERP program that delivers what was promised and one that delivers a lesson at considerable cost.

Before the next one begins: ask the six questions.