The recipe for choosing a successful ERP partner

When it comes to my favourite meal it has to be my wife's steak, mushroom, port, and stilton pie. She uses the best rib-eye steak with just enough fat to help give extra flavour to the dish. The mushrooms are a mix of large Portobellos with a small amount of porcinis to give that additional earthy taste, then a splash of Port and a generous handful of mature stilton, making the gravy thick and creamy. All this is topped off with the flakiest, crunchiest puff pastry and served with delicious new potatoes.

If you're feeling hungry now, sorry about that. Me too. But this isn't just an excuse to talk about my wife's cooking, it's actually a handy way to represent an ERP project.

Get the right ingredients

When one vital ingredient is missing, it's hugely frustrating and effects the balance of the whole meal. You may as well just save your effort and buy a basic, frozen pie. But why settle for a cheaper alternative?

I'm going to run with this metaphor, so bear with me. The ingredients for your ERP pie are the resources you use; the project team, software, hardware, hosting platform, and vendor. You'll need to research these well, choose the best available ‘produce', and implement it with perfect timing to make sure that you're cooking on gas.

Find the right partner

Okay, I'll dispense with the pie metaphor now and get down to basics. Everybody talks about choosing the right software to meet the needs of your business, which I agree is a very important aspect, but ...