Sixteen months after go-live, a 300-employee specialty chemicals maker finally ran a benefits review. The result was uncomfortable. They had spent $1.4 million and could prove $310,000 in savings.
The rest was not wasted. It was simply never measured, because nobody had written down a baseline before the project started.
The mistake happens in month one, not month twelve
If you do not record today’s numbers, you cannot claim credit later. Before any configuration work begins, write down six to eight measures with their current values.
- Days to close the books each month.
- Inventory record accuracy, measured on a fixed sample of 100 items.
- On-time delivery percentage.
- Order entry time per order, timed with a stopwatch.
- Number of manual spreadsheet handoffs in the order-to-cash cycle.
- Overtime hours in finance and the warehouse during the last week of each month.
Twelve numbers on one page, dated and signed by the sponsor. That page is worth more than any status report you will ever produce.
What the chemicals maker found at month 12
Close time fell from 11 days to 6. Order entry dropped from 14 minutes to 5. Inventory accuracy rose from 78% to 94%. Real, provable gains.
But nobody had tracked expedited freight, which had quietly doubled over the same period. A benefit you do not measure is a cost you will discover later. Most ERP Consulting value disappears in the gap between go-live and the first honest review.
How to run the review in one afternoon
- Pull the baseline page and recompute every number exactly the way it was first measured.
- List every result, including the ones that got worse. The bad numbers are the reason to run the review at all.
- Pick the three largest gaps and assign each an owner with a 90-day target.
- Give the sponsor a one-page summary, not a slide deck. One page gets read.
Schedule this review before go-live. Put it on the calendar for month 12 with the sponsor’s name on the invitation, so it cannot quietly disappear.
Today, open a document and write the six numbers you can measure this week. It takes 20 minutes, and it is the difference between running a project and proving a result.