When manufacturers ask me what to look for in an ERP implementation partner, they usually ask about experience, references, and price. Those are fine questions. But they’re not the right question.
The right question is this: how many of your consultants have actually worked in manufacturing? Not implemented ERP for manufacturers. Worked in one. On a floor. With a bill of materials in their hand.
The Pen Pal Problem
Early in my career I was on a project where the implementation team was twelve time zones away. When something went wrong at two in the afternoon, we filed a ticket. They’d get to it overnight. We’d review it the next morning. A conversation that should have taken two hours became a four-day email chain.
That’s not a partner. That’s a pen pal.
And the time zone gap was actually the least of it. The bigger problem was the translator layer. A US-based person took our requirements and handed them to a team that had never seen our environment. That team built what they thought we said. What came back was technically correct and completely unusable.
The Yogurt Guy
The second story is the one I tell most often. We were building a replenishment model using expiration dates. iPads had just come out and we wanted shop floor workers entering inventory data on them. Simple enough in theory.
Except the people building the screens had never watched a warehouse worker work. So they built exactly what the spec said. Three steps to enter one piece of data. Validation screens everywhere. The works.
My line at the time was: these are guys where success is defined as showing up. You think they’re navigating three screens to log an expiration date?
The pilot was with Whole Foods. It failed. Not because the replenishment model didn’t work. It failed because nobody would touch the iPad.
What to Ask Before You Sign Anything
Ask every implementation partner you’re evaluating the same question: how many of your consultants have actually worked in manufacturing? Not adjacent to it. In it.
If they can’t answer that cleanly, you have your answer.
Watch the clip above. Then reach us at blackirongroup.com/contact if you want to talk about what the right team actually looks like.