Everyone budgets for licences, configuration and training. Almost nobody budgets properly for the state of the data they already have — and that is the line item that decides the outcome.
We are usually brought into an ERP programme at one of two moments: at the very beginning, or four months after go-live when finance still cannot close the month. The second call is far more common, and the cause is almost always the same.
The demo is not the problem
Modern ERP platforms are good. Odoo, ERPNext and Dynamics all do what the sales engineer showed you. The gap is never between the demo and the product — it is between the demo's clean sample data and the eleven years of accumulated reality sitting in your current system.
That reality typically includes the same supplier entered nine times with nine spellings, products whose unit of measure changed in 2021 without the historical rows being updated, and a chart of accounts that three different finance managers each partly restructured.
What a serious migration plan contains
- A data audit before the platform is selected, not after. What you find can legitimately change which platform is right.
- An explicit decision, per entity, on what is migrated, what is archived, and what is abandoned. Not everything deserves to move.
- A named owner on the client side for each data domain, with authority to decide which of the nine supplier spellings is correct.
- At least three full rehearsal migrations into a staging environment, with finance reconciling the output each time.
- A written rollback plan that someone has actually executed once.
The uncomfortable conversation worth having early
Data quality is rarely a technical problem. It is a record of how the business has actually operated, including the workarounds people invented because the old system did not fit. Cleaning it means someone senior deciding what the truth is — and that decision cannot be delegated to the implementation partner.
The programmes that succeed are the ones where that conversation happens in month one, with the budget and the authority to match. The ones that fail are the ones where it happens in month eight, in a meeting about why the numbers do not reconcile.