The Questions Too Few Companies
Ask During ERP Selection
A Practical Perspective for CFOs, COOs, and Operations Leaders Evaluating an ERP Platform
Looking for a new ERP? Get ready for a lot of questions.
Can the system support our current processes? Does it integrate with our existing applications? How well does it handle our reporting requirements? What will implementation cost?
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In most mid-sized companies, there is no dedicated evaluation team. More often, the CFO prepares the decision with the finance team – this is the basis for a recommendation to the CEO or managing director. Yet one of the most important considerations often receives surprisingly little attention – not because organizations ignore it deliberately, but because it doesn’t fit neatly into a requirements spreadsheet or a vendor scorecard.
This article examines why many ERP selection projects remain tied to current business models, the risks this poses for future growth, and how to make a strategic decision when evaluating platforms.
When ERP Selection Becomes a Snapshot of Today's Business
Imagine you’re a growing company operating in a single country, with one legal entity, one warehouse, and a relatively straightforward operating model. Maybe that doesn’t even require imagination – maybe it more or less describes you today.
Your ERP evaluation will naturally reflect your reality. Requirements focus on current transaction volumes, existing reporting needs, and your present organizational structure. And in many ways, that makes perfect sense.
Five years on, the same company may operate across several countries, manage multiple legal entities, support additional sales channels, and face materially more complex compliance requirements. The organization has evolved – and the system selected years earlier now has to support a business that looks very different from the one that originally chose it.
This is where many ERP decisions reveal their true strengths – or limitations.
“Companies naturally focus on today’s requirements during ERP selection. What I always tell my clients is: you’re not buying software for today. You’re buying flexibility for what comes next.”
Ani Indshewa, Head of Sales, Alta Via Consulting
The more consequential question is whether it can support requirements that have not yet emerged.
The Organization Will Change Faster Than the Software
Business transformation rarely follows the timeline of technology investments. Markets expand, product portfolios evolve, new business units appear, companies acquire competitors, and regulatory and reporting demands grow.
Change is a given. What trips up ERP decisions is the assumption quietly baked into most evaluations: that today’s operating model is roughly how the company will still run years from now.
This is where our own project experience is pointed. When a company comes to us for a new ERP, the trigger is rarely a simple case of outdated technology. In Parth Virkud’s experience, 8 out of 10 companies had chosen a system that genuinely fit the business they were at the time – it just could no longer carry a specific growth step: internationalization, a new product line, or preparing for an IPO.
“About 80% of the companies that come to us haven’t chosen a bad system. They chose a system that fit the company they were – not the company they were becoming.”
Parth Virkud, Managing Director, Alta Via Consulting
The companies that handle this best, in Parth’s experience, start the conversation well before the system actually breaks – while there is still room to decide calmly rather than react under pressure.
The Questions You Should Really Ask
Traditional ERP evaluations are built around functional requirements: whether the system can support specific processes, tasks and reports. Those factors matter – but they are only part of the picture. Equally important:
- What happens if transaction volumes double or triple?
- What happens if we establish legal entities in several countries?
- What happens if our reporting obligations become significantly more complex?
- What happens if we acquire another business?
- What happens if our operating model changes?
- What happens if finance, operations and commerce need to work from a shared global structure?
These may not be immediate priorities. Yet they are often exactly the situations that decide whether an ERP investment stays effective over time.
Consider a simple example – adding a legal entity in another country. With a scalable platform in place, our project experience shows that rolling out that additional entity using the same processes typically takes just two to four weeks because the base configuration already exists.
In contrast, doing the same within an on-premises or best-of-breed landscape that has grown over years turns this step into a major 4-to-12-month project, as it effectively has to be rebuilt each time.
“An additional entity with the same processes is a matter of a couple weeks on a scalable platform, because the groundwork is done. On a landscape that grew over years, every new entity is several months – a small project of its own.”
Parth Virkud, Managing Director, Alta Via Consulting
Why Feature Comparisons Only Tell Part of the Story
One pattern recurs in ERP evaluations: the discussion narrows to individual features. Teams compare approval workflows, reporting, dashboards, and specific process steps in fine detail. Entire workshops go into which system performs one task more elegantly.
These discussions can matter – but they can also create a false sense of certainty.
“Some ERP selection workshops spend hours debating individual features that nobody will remember six months after go-live.”
Ani Indshewa, Head of Sales, Alta Via Consulting
Organizations rarely regret an ERP decision because a specific report looked slightly better during a product demonstration or because one workflow required one less click. The harder problems usually surface years later, once the business has moved beyond the assumptions made during the evaluation.
“Features are often the easiest part of an ERP decision to compare. Foundational architecture is usually the hardest. And this is what determines how well a platform supports the business over time.”
Parth Virkud, Managing Director, Alta Via Consulting
Features can be configured, extended or replaced over time. Architecture is far harder to change – which is why the time it takes to add an entity, a market or a business model says more about a platform than any feature grid.
Selecting for the Business You Intend to Build
None of this means an organization should try to predict every future requirement – that is impossible. Effective ERP selection holds two questions at once: What does the business need today? And what kind of organization does it intend to become?
The most effective decisions treat an ERP as what it is: a strategic choice that shapes how information flows, how processes scale, and how future growth is supported. This underscores why the previously mentioned 80% figure is critical: the systems that later needed rebuilding were rarely wrong for the company at the time. They were wrong for the company it became.
“The most expensive ERP limitations are rarely the ones visible during evaluation. They emerge when the organization grows beyond the assumptions that shaped the original selection.”
Parth Virkud, Managing Director, Alta Via Consulting
Evaluating a platform only against today’s requirements optimizes for today’s challenges. Evaluating it against where the organization intends to go helps ensure the decision remains viable long after go-live.
Conclusion: The Right Questions Define Your Success
The best ERP decisions are rarely the ones that score highest against today’s requirements. They are the ones that remain effective when those requirements inevitably change.
For organizations evaluating ERP platforms now, that does not mean predicting every future scenario. It means widening the conversation beyond features and functionality – and adding three questions:
- How easily can the architecture support new entities, markets or business models?
- How much change can the platform absorb before significant redesign becomes necessary?
- Which assumptions about our organization are built into this decision today?
Features can often be configured, extended or replaced over time. Architecture is much harder to change.
That is why the most successful ERP selection projects are not simply focused on what the system can do today. They focus on whether the platform provides a foundation for the organization’s future growth.
Because in the end, ERP selection is not just a software decision. It is a decision about how your organization will operate, grow, and adapt in the years ahead.
