Roughly one in three ERP projects we take over is a rescue. The software is rarely the problem. These are the seven causes, in the order we encounter them.
- Nobody wrote the scope down. Without a signed scope, "finished" is whatever the last conversation implied. Every rescue project we have seen started here.
- The people who do the work were not in the room. Requirements gathered only from management produce software that management likes and the store keeper cannot use.
- Migration was treated as an afterthought. Dirty data does not become clean by moving. Duplicate customer masters and unreconciled opening balances break trust in the system in week one.
- Go-live was a single big-bang switch. Two weeks of parallel running costs less than one day of a stalled warehouse.
- Training happened once, before go-live. People forget what they learn before they need it. Train again in week two, when they have real questions.
- No named owner on the client side. A project with a committee instead of an owner drifts. One person must be able to decide.
- The vendor disappeared after handover. The first month-end close is when everything surfaces. If nobody is answering, staff quietly revert to spreadsheets.
The warning sign to watch for
Three months after go-live, ask your accounts team what they use to close the month. If the answer involves exporting to Excel, the implementation has failed regardless of what the project status report says. Shadow spreadsheets are the reliable symptom — they appear wherever the system does not do the job.