Previously on ERP Survivor
Dramatic music. Montage of conference rooms, whiteboards buried in process diagrams, and people squinting at screens at 7 p.m.
Narrator: “Twelve departments. One Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. A six-month timeline that nobody believes. Only the strongest business processes will survive.”
The pain is real. If you are a controller or operations manager about to retire a wall of spreadsheets for a single system, you are the contestant. Here is the survival guide, with the actual lessons in plain English at each commercial break.
Why this season matters now
ERP projects fail at a rate that should scare any owner signing the check. Independent surveys such as the Panorama Consulting ERP report put cost or schedule overruns on a large share of implementations, and the usual culprit is not the software. It is change management: people quietly keeping their old spreadsheets running in parallel until the new system starves.
For a Denver SMB (5-200 employees), that failure has a price tag you can feel. A stalled rollout means paying for software you do not use, a finance team doing the work twice, and a month-end close that gets slower instead of faster. The win is the opposite: a single source of truth, a close that drops from two weeks to a few days, and audit-ready numbers without a fire drill.
Meet your contestants
The Spreadsheet People (Finance tribe)
- Linda, the Excel Empress — has a personal relationship with every VLOOKUP ever written
- Dave, Macro Man — believes any problem yields to a 47-tab workbook
- Sarah, the Sum-If Savant — speaks in formulas, dreams in pivot tables
The Legacy Loyalists (Operations tribe)
- Bob, the Database Whisperer — has run the same inventory system since 1987 and sees no reason to stop
- Carol, the Custom Code Queen — has written 47 workarounds for the current system
- Mike, Migration Mike — certain the data conversion will work perfectly on the first try
The ERP Evangelists (IT — Information Technology — tribe)
- Jennifer, Integration Jenny — believes ERP will solve world hunger
- Tom, Best Practices Tom — has memorized the vendor methodology and quotes it at parties
- Alex, API (Application Programming Interface) Alex — thinks every gap closes with the right connector
Episode 1: the alliance of the spreadsheet people
The immunity challenge: requirements gathering
Host: “Today’s challenge is requirements gathering. Each tribe documents its current processes and what it needs from the new ERP. The tribe with the most realistic requirements wins immunity from the first round of scope creep.”
Finance tribe strategy session
Linda: “The new system needs to do everything our spreadsheets do, but faster.”
Dave: “And auto-generate month-end reports, quarterly forecasts, budget variance, and that special report Linda built for the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) that shows profit by phase of the moon.”
Sarah (typing frantically): “I’m documenting all 247 of our templates. Should I include the backup copies of the backup copies?”
Linda: “Of course. And it must support our color-coding. Red is urgent, yellow means I need to review it, and green means… we are not sure, but we have used it for twelve years.”
Commercial break — the lesson: Spreadsheet sprawl is not a quirk. It is a control failure. Two-hundred-plus templates with no version control means nobody can prove which number is correct at close. The goal of ERP is not to rebuild every spreadsheet inside the software. It is to decide which numbers are official, who owns them, and where they live. “Make it work like Excel” is the request that sinks the project.
Operations tribe panic mode
Bob: “The ERP people say we cannot customize the inventory module to match our current system exactly.”
Carol: “But what about our process for back-ordered items that were pre-ordered, then re-ordered during the seasonal adjustment period?”
Mike: “The data conversion will handle it. How hard can migrating 30 years of data be, from a system customized by seventeen programmers who all left without documentation?”
Bob (staring into the distance): “We had a good system. A simple system. You could fix it with a screwdriver and a can of compressed air.”
Commercial break — the lesson: Every undocumented workaround is a landmine for data migration. Before you move a single record, inventory the customizations and ask which ones reflect a real business rule versus a habit that grew around a system limitation. Most of Carol’s 47 workarounds disappear when the underlying constraint does. The ones that survive become configuration, not custom code.
IT tribe’s overconfidence hour
Jennifer: “Once we go live, all our data will flow between departments and create a single source of truth.”
Tom (consulting his binder): “Per the methodology, Phase 1.3.2.B clearly states 47% efficiency gains in the first quarter.”
Alex: “If anything breaks, I’ll write a custom integration. A weekend, two tops.”
Commercial break — the lesson: Vendor methodologies are useful, but the published percentages are marketing, not a forecast for your shop. Treat every “tops, two weekends” integration estimate as the optimistic end of a range and double it. The teams that succeed plan for the connectors that will not work on the first try.
The plot twist: reality strikes
Host: “Today’s guest judge is an actual ERP consultant who has seen this before.”
Guest Judge (chuckling): “Let me guess. Finance wants the system to be Excel. Operations wants nothing to change. IT thinks this wraps in six months with no issues.”
Uncomfortable silence.
Guest Judge: “First reality check. Every one of you will change how you work. Your templates will become obsolete. Your workarounds will become standard functionality. And it will take longer and cost more than you budgeted.”
Linda (hyperventilating): “But… my macros!”
Bob (muttering): “I knew this was a bad idea.”
Jennifer: “But the efficiency gains!”
The alliance forms
Narrator: “Faced with reality, unlikely alliances form…”
Linda and Bob, huddled in the break room.
Linda: “Bob, I know we have fought about month-end reconciliation, but we need to stick together.”
Bob: “They want to eliminate everything we built. My inventory system is old, but it works.”
Linda: “And my reports are complex, but management sees exactly what it needs.”
Bob: “So we push for minimal changes?”
Linda: “Deal. The Alliance of the Spreadsheet People is born.”
Commercial break — the lesson: This alliance is the moment most rollouts die. When your most knowledgeable people quietly agree to resist, they keep the old systems alive in the shadows, and the new ERP never becomes the system of record. The fix is not to overrule Linda and Bob. It is to recruit them. Make them the ones who design the new process, and the alliance flips from blocker to backbone.
How a real rollout plays out
You do not win this game with software. You win it with a phased plan that gives skeptics a job.
- Discovery and process mapping (2-4 weeks). Document how work actually happens, not how the org chart says it should. This is where Linda’s 247 templates get triaged into “keep as a report,” “becomes a system function,” and “should never have existed.”
- Design and configuration (4-8 weeks). Adopt the vendor’s standard chart of accounts and workflows wherever they fit; configure, do not customize, unless a real business rule demands it. Microsoft’s own Dynamics 365 implementation guidance is a solid primary source for what a disciplined methodology looks like.
- Data migration and validation (3-6 weeks, overlapping). Migrate in waves, reconcile each wave against the old system, and have Bob sign off on inventory counts. Migration is the step that always runs long.
- User acceptance testing and training (2-4 weeks). Real users run real transactions before go-live. Make the spreadsheet loyalists your testers; if it survives Linda, it will survive anyone.
- Go-live and stabilization (4-8 weeks). Plan for a slower close the first cycle, then faster every cycle after. Retire the old spreadsheets on a date, in writing, so nobody runs both in parallel.
Watch-outs that eliminate contestants
- Parallel systems. If the old spreadsheets keep running “just in case,” the ERP becomes a second job, not a replacement. Set a retirement date and enforce it.
- Customizing to preserve old habits. Every customization is a cost you pay again at the next upgrade. Default to standard configuration.
- Skipping the people work. The software installs in weeks. Adoption takes a quarter. Budget time for training, sponsorship from an owner or controller, and a few internal champions.
Next step
Facing your own implementation reality check? See our [[ERP consulting]], including the change-management work that keeps the Alliance of the Spreadsheet People on your side instead of against you.
Based on patterns observed across dozens of ERP implementations. The characters are fictional. The struggles are not. No spreadsheets were harmed in the making of this episode — though several were, mercifully, retired.
Next episode: “The great chart of accounts debate,” where Linda discovers the new system does not support her 47 project codes, and Bob learns that best practices do not include his legendary emergency override procedure.