ERP Strategy Planning
Upgrade or Replace Your ERP Based on Relative Benefits, Costs, and Risks
The Challenge and Opportunity
At most companies, management would admit that business application usage and enterprise process continuity could be improved—often significantly. Small business application projects are often straightforward and not costly or risky. But how to best improve major systems like ERP is rarely clear.
To proceed with confidence on ERP improvements, key questions need answers:
Can existing ERP be improved or upgraded to meet current and projected needs? For how long?
Are there enough deficiencies in current ERP functionality, technology, or vendor status to justify a new ERP search?
What is the proper role for other existing or potential new business applications?
Who should be responsible for business applications, related department coordination, and change management?
Without clear answers, companies tend to delay improving ERP and other major business applications. The answers to these questions—plus many related details—constitute an Enterprise Business Application Strategy plan.
Most companies approach ERP as a technology decision. It's a business transformation decision requiring strategic planning first.
Our Approach
Step 1: ERP Strategy Education
Before diving into analysis, we bring your team up to speed on the strategic landscape:
Your options: Compare improving your existing ERP and satellite applications versus implementing new ERP—evaluated on benefits, costs, and risks
Industry context: How the ERP industry works, cost control strategies, why buyer control matters, vendor contract tactics, implementation risk management, and more
This foundation supports informed decision-making throughout the strategy process.
Step 2: Strategic Discovery
We conduct a focused, low-impact discovery exercise to understand your specific situation. This work is designed to be efficient and discreet—often completed quietly to avoid speculation among rank-and-file employees:
Strategic plans and business vision
Business process areas and units in scope
Current business applications status and gaps
IT infrastructure assessment
Existing ERP commercial terms analysis
Current cost structure for major business applications
Client involvement: Small leadership group, minimal disruption to operations. AI organizes and analyzes all findings, dramatically reducing the time burden typical of traditional discovery.
Your Enterprise Discovery repository begins here—all findings organized in your client-controlled platform for future use.
Step 3: Market ERP Assessment
To establish realistic comparison benchmarks, we evaluate how current market ERP would serve your needs:
Identify two representative current-market ERP systems based on your industry and size
AI-powered functional assessment testing how well each meets your strategic and business process priorities
Establishes the "new ERP potential" baseline for comparison
The target ERPs are not even contacted—the AI process is sufficient for setting this current market comparison.
Step 4: AI-Driven Strategy Analysis
Our AI methods analyze all discovery inputs to produce comprehensive weighted scoring across three scenarios:
Scenario A: Status Quo
Existing ERP without major improvements—current status
Scenario B: Major Upgrade
Existing ERP with significant enhancement or upgrade path
Scenario C: New ERP
Properly selected and implemented modern system
The AI generates quantified assessment across:
Strategic alignment scoring
Functional capability gaps
Cost analysis (initial and long-term)
Risk assessment (technical, operational, commercial)
IT infrastructure modernization requirements
Weighted overall scoring with transparent methodology
This analysis happens at AI speed—comprehensive results that would take consultants weeks are produced in hours.
Step 5: Strategy Validation & Delivery
EAI Review: We validate AI findings against our experience, tune recommendations, verify nothing critical was missed
Client Validation: Your small leadership team reviews findings, provides input, refines assumptions
Strategy Presentation: Comprehensive meeting to present full analysis, discuss implications, answer questions, establish direction
What You Achieve
Complete ERP Strategy Report with weighted scenario scoring
Enterprise Discovery repository (organized, searchable, implementation-ready if you proceed)
Clear strategic direction with transparent methodology
Strengthened capability to execute—whether improving existing ERP or moving to new system
Roadmap for next steps
AI Acceleration Points
1. Critical Strategic and Business Functionality Topics Development
Traditional approach: Time-consuming and costly interviews potentially using lists of candidate topics to discuss.
Our AI approach: Multi-input analysis generates customized critical strategic and business functionality topics that only require client team review and potential tuning to be stable.
AI Engine Inputs:
~20 company-specific variables (size, industry, business model, strategic priorities, current systems, pain points, regulatory environment, timeline, constraints)
Your business process category (BPC) structure (customized for your company, not template)
1,500+ candidate functionality topics (our master library from 1,000+ projects)
Prior documentation if available (your strategic plans, process maps, improvement initiatives, prior consultant reports)
Industry factors (best practices frameworks, regulatory requirements, trade group standards, compliance certifications)
What AI Does: Analyzes all inputs together—scanning 1,500 candidate topics against your specific situation, industry patterns, regulatory requirements, and strategic priorities. Generates customized critical topics list organized by your business process categories, with context for "why this likely matters for YOUR company."
EAI Refinement: We review AI output, test recommendations against our experience, refine topics based on nuances AI might miss.
Client Validation: Client teams conduct a validation review of the AI results with a focus on tagging the more important topics. To reach this same result with classic consulting takes weeks of disruptive and costly workshops, with AI-driven results significantly more targeted and complete. 20x or better time savings.
2. Strategic Priorities Processing
Traditional approach: Consultant interprets interview notes, writes opinion-based report.
Our AI approach: Interview results processed by AI to identify patterns, extract priorities, quantify strategic opportunities and risks. Weighted scoring across strategic options with transparent methodology.
Result: Not consultant opinion. Calculated analysis with visible scoring factors.
3. Enterprise Discovery Repository
Traditional approach: Strategy findings captured in consultant report, filed away, forgotten.
Our AI approach: All strategic discovery organized in client-controlled collaboration platform. Modern knowledge management system becoming foundation for selection (if you proceed to Service 2) and implementation (if you proceed to Service 3).
You own it. You control it. It builds value through each phase.
4. Strategy Report with Weighted Scoring
Traditional approach: Consultant recommendations based on experience and judgment.
Our AI approach: AI accepts client variables, analyzes opportunities and risks, produces strategy report with sophisticated weighted scoring. EAI tunes the result using a standard review checklist, AI recalculates, iterative refinement until strategy and options are clear.
Output: Quantified assessment of your enterprise business application options with transparent scoring methodology.
Investment
Contact us for a project proposal. Scope varies. Our AI-powered methodology works at least 3x faster than consultants attempting similar depth, resulting in competitive pricing with significantly superior outcomes.
ERP Selection – Provo Craft
EAI-SoftSelect was a great partner throughout the process of choosing an ERP solution. They helped us control the terms throughout the ERP buying process, and we achieved impressive results in reduced ERP license fees.
Having an experienced partner like EAI-SoftSelect, helped us negotiate for the products we need and set our expectations for the process of implementing these solutions.
ERP Selection – Leupold & Stevens
Long term ERP license costs were initially very difficult to calculate. Working with EAI-SoftSelect we were able to insist on a predicable ERP license fee approach and achieve much lower initial and ongoing license fee costs.
ERP Selection – Cornell Pump
Negotiating ERP costs is complicated and the ERP software vendors take advantage of the buyer’s lack of experience. EAI-SoftSelect’s experience and influence helped us level the playing field. We clearly saved money and lowered our long term risk.
