Most ERP selections are decided by the quality of the demo. That's backwards. By the time a vendor is presenting, the questions that determine success should already be answered.
What problem are we actually solving? "Our system is old" isn't a business case. Slow close, payroll errors or blind spots in margin are.
Which processes must we standardise — and which make us different? Adopt best practice for the first group; protect the second.
Where does our data live today, and how clean is it? Migration effort is the most underestimated line in every budget.
What must integrate on day one? Payroll providers, banks, CRM and warehouse systems all shape the architecture.
Who will own the system after go-live? A platform without an owner degrades within a year.
How will we measure success? Agree three to five measurable outcomes before signing anything.
What's our appetite for change? The best platform fails if the organisation isn't ready to adopt it.
Answer these honestly and your shortlist usually shrinks from six vendors to two — and your implementation partner can quote with far more confidence.
If you'd like a structured way to start, our ERP Readiness Check covers several of these questions in two minutes.
Payroll
Why parallel payroll runs are non-negotiable
CoreTech Payroll Practice5 min read
A parallel run means processing the same pay period in both the legacy and new systems, then comparing every result line by line. It is time-consuming. It is also the single most effective way to make sure your people are paid correctly on day one.
What parallel runs catch
Misconfigured earnings and deductions, tax setup gaps, retro calculations, rounding differences, missing employee data and integration timing issues — the kinds of errors that look tiny in testing and enormous on a payslip.
How many is enough?
We recommend at least two, and three for complex or multi-country payrolls. Each cycle should end with a documented variance analysis, root causes and fixes, and a sign-off before the next run.
Our rule: no payroll go-live without a reconciled parallel run. The cost of a run is small; the cost of a wrong payday is trust.
Analytics
From exports to answers: analytics leaders actually use
CoreTech Data & Analytics7 min read
In many organisations, the monthly management pack is still built by exporting data from several systems and stitching it together in spreadsheets. It's slow, fragile and nobody fully trusts the numbers.
Start with the decision, not the data
Ask leaders which decisions they make each month and what they need to make them faster. Build backwards from there — three great dashboards beat thirty that nobody opens.
Blend inside a governed layer
Bring CRM, warehouse and legacy data alongside live ERP data under one permission model, so a manager sees exactly what they're entitled to — no more, no less.
Ship in weeks
Templated pipelines and a small number of agreed metrics let you deliver a first useful dashboard within weeks, then iterate with real feedback.
Want these insights applied to your ERP?
Book a conversation with the consultants who wrote them.
