The plant manager was proud of his list. One hundred forty-seven change requests, gathered from every department over four months. He called it making the system fit how we work.
Fourteen months later they went live with 61 of them, and those 61 nearly broke the company. Every customization is a small promise you keep forever — through upgrades, new hires, and audits. Custom code does not retire when the person who asked for it does.
We sorted 147 requests in two hours
Three piles on a whiteboard. The result surprised everyone in the room, including the plant manager. I have run this sort on every ERP Consulting project for over a decade, and the ratio is almost always the same.
- 89 requests were workarounds for a process that was already broken. The software was never the problem.
- 40 were reporting preferences — one more column, a different label. Those belong in reports, not in the core workflow.
- 18 were genuinely specific to the business, like tracking customer-supplied tooling through the shop floor.
The honest number was 18. Not 147. That is an eight-fold difference in what you maintain for the next ten years.
The question that kills most requests
Ask the requester: if this screen looked different but the outcome stayed identical, would you still need it? Most people say no. They were describing a habit, not a requirement.
Then ask: what happens if we do nothing for 90 days? Anything that can wait 90 days usually reveals itself as a preference. Requirements that survive both questions go to the steering committee, not to a developer’s queue.
How to run change requests after go-live
- One form, one inbox, one weekly review meeting. No hallway requests, no emails to the IT manager.
- Every request states the business problem in one sentence and the cost of not solving it.
- Approved changes ship in a quarterly bundle. Nothing goes in alone.
- Every approved change gets an owner who confirms the benefit 60 days later.
Budget 20% of your project time for post-go-live changes and treat that budget as fixed. When it runs out, new requests wait for next quarter.
The most valuable thing ERP Consulting delivers is rarely the configuration. It is the discipline to say no. Apply the two questions above to your next change request before it reaches anyone’s backlog — that single habit saves more money than any technical decision you will make this year.