Your ERP is not the problem
Every shop we walk into blames the ERP. Almost none of them have an ERP problem — they have a handoff problem, and replacing the software would leave it exactly where it is.
The first thing we hear on almost every floor walk is some version of “our ERP can’t do that.” Sometimes it’s true. Far more often the ERP can do it, nobody trusts what comes out, and a spreadsheet has quietly become the real system of record.
Trace the handoffs, not the software
Pick one job and follow it end to end. Every time a number gets re-keyed, exported, emailed, or remembered, mark it. On a typical high-mix shop we find between twelve and thirty of these before we reach shipping.
Those handoffs are where the delay lives. None of them are ERP features.
A replacement ERP inherits every handoff you had before, plus eighteen months of implementation.
What actually moves the needle
- Make one number authoritative, and delete every competing copy of it.
- Automate the export that someone currently does by hand every Monday.
- Rebuild the meeting around the live number instead of a slide about it.
None of that requires new software. All of it requires deciding who owns the number.