Same software. Same 14-month timeline. Same regional implementation partner. Plant A in Ohio has 180 employees and closes its books in six days. Plant B in Tennessee has 165 employees and still takes 17. They went live eight months apart.
I sat in on both post-mortems. The difference had nothing to do with the software, the budget, or how hard people worked.
The difference was who sat in the steering meetings
Plant A put a line supervisor, a shipping lead, and an AP clerk in the room next to the directors. Those three people flagged 60 small problems before go-live, mostly around how work actually flowed on second shift.
Plant B’s steering team was four directors and a project manager. Every decision passed down through layers, and the people who had to live with the answers heard about them last.
Training on your own mess beats training on sample data
Plant B did a four-hour classroom session on a clean demo dataset. Everyone passed. Then they hit their own inventory, with its missing bins and odd units of measure, and froze.
Plant A trained three weeks before go-live in 90-minute sessions using their own live data and their own worst orders. Slower to schedule, far faster to stick.
- Train in the room where the work happens, not a conference room across the parking lot.
- Use ten real transactions from last month, including one ugly one.
- Keep sessions at 90 minutes and cap the group at eight people.
- Have each person complete one full cycle on their own before they leave.
The 30 days after go-live decide everything
Plant A stationed two floor-level fixers per shift for the first month — people who could unblock a picker in 30 seconds instead of filing a ticket. Plant B routed every issue to a help desk with a two-day response time.
By week three, Plant B’s crew had built a shadow spreadsheet system to get work out the door. Nobody killed it. It is still running today, which means the system of record is not actually the system of record.
That shadow spreadsheet, not the software, is what you are really paying to avoid. Good ERP Consulting focuses on the first 30 days as hard as the go-live date. The ERP Consulting contract usually ends at go-live, and that is exactly when the real work starts.
If you are mid-implementation right now, name two people per shift who can fix problems on the spot for the first month. Put their names on a wall. That single move is worth more than another week of configuration.