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 defensible improvements to ERP and other major business applications. The answers to these questions—plus many related details—constitute an Enterprise Business Application Strategy plan.
Many companies approach ERP largely as a technology decision. In reality what is matters has little to do with technology—and our ERP advisory offering targets factors of importance.
Our Approach
Step 1: Project Initiation — Client Team and Scope (Week 1)
We confirm the right participants and align on scope before the work begins:
Business process areas and the client team members to involve—including executives to brief on the approach, progress, and intended results
Business structure, key stakeholders, and the strategic goals the plan will serve going forward
Step 2: ERP Industry Education — For Client Team (Weeks 1–2)
Before the 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 ERP strategy process.
Step 3: Enterprise Discovery Collection with Client (Weeks 2–5) 
AI-accelerated
Discovery starts with AI, not a blank page. Before interviews begin, our AI generates a customized set of the critical strategic and business-process topics most likely to drive your ERP decision—specific to your company, industry, and current systems.
The discovery stays focused, low-impact, and discreet—often run quietly to avoid speculation among rank-and-file employees. Interviews move quickly because they validate and refine the AI-surfaced topics rather than starting from scratch, covering:
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: A small leadership group, minimal disruption to operations. Because interviews validate AI-generated topics rather than discovering from scratch, they are shorter and more targeted—and 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. Details on AI - Accelerated Requirements development.
Step 4: Test Current Market ERP (Weeks 4–6) AI-accelerated
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 usually not directly contacted—as the AI process is sufficient for setting this current market comparison.
Step 5: ERP Strategy Development (Weeks 5–7) AI-accelerated
Our AI methods score each viable improvement path—which typically are building on your current ERP to replacing it—against your highest-priority strategic, business-process, and technical needs, then roll the results into a single side-by-side comparison:
Scenario A: Status Quo
Improve 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, for all viable improvement paths, in the following areas:
Strategic alignment
Functional capabilities and 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 6: ERP Strategy Plan Validation and Finalizing (Weeks 7–8)
EAI Review: We validate AI findings against our experience, tune recommendations, verify important items are properly covered
Client Validation: Your small leadership team reviews findings, provides input, refines results
Strategy Presentation: Comprehensive meeting to present full analysis, discuss implications, answer questions, establish direction
What You Achieve
ERP Strategy Report with a side-by-side, weighted comparison of each viable improvement path
Enterprise Discovery repository (organized, searchable, for any improvement path chosen)
Strategic direction for ERP with transparent methodology
Strengthened capability to execute—whether improving existing ERP or moving to new system
Roadmap for next steps
How your functional requirements get built — a proven library, not a checklist
The ERP strategy substantially rests on knowing which functional priorities actually matter. That starts with EAI's pre-built requirements library—over 1,900 functional requirements drawn from 1,000+ prior engagements and spanning 35 industries. Every requirement is already tagged and priority-scored, so the right ones surface for your company without anyone re-evaluating the whole library by hand.
AI then screens that library down to your company—firing on your business profile and the business process categories in scope, and weighing your stated priorities and current applications. Your team and EAI validate the result: confirm what fits, challenge what's missing, add what only you know. What comes out is one report, organized by your business process categories, with the critical priorities ranked in plain view—the "critical 20%" that should drive decisions.
35 industries
Pre-tagged & priority-scored
One ranked report
WHY IT HOLDS UP
Two design choices make the result defensible rather than a matter of opinion. First, two-group tagging: targeted tags find what fits your specific situation, while general tags guarantee everything else still gets seen—so nothing relevant quietly disappears. Second, calibrated priority scoring: every requirement is scored the same way on five factors—importance, impact to downstream processes, company-to-company variance, risk, and whether there's a credible path outside the ERP—calibrated across the entire library, and the weighting can even be tuned to your company's style. The result is a statement of functional priorities you can stand behind in front of company leadership.
In ERP strategy work, we lean on the surfaced priorities—often only the top few percent of the list—to frame where ERP can move the business and to test improvement paths. The full list is set aside until later phases; only genuine functional priorities drive the ERP strategy conversation.
AI Acceleration Points
Four points where AI does something consultants can't practically match by hand. Click any to expand.
1. Critical Strategic and Business Functionality Topics Development
Traditional approach: Time-consuming and costly interviews potentially using legacy techniques to drive discussions.
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 company size, industry, business model, strategic priorities, current systems, pain points, regulatory environment, timeline, constraints)
The estimated business process domain of your ERP improvement work—aligning with our library of business process categories (BPC)
Over 1,900 candidate functionality requirements (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 over 1,900 candidate requirements against your specific situation, industry patterns, regulatory requirements, and strategic priorities. Generates customized critical topics list organized by 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—all in the context of ERP strategy planning.
Client Validation: Client teams conduct a validation review of the AI results with a focus on the most important topics to be used in the planning. 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 for all involved
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 and implementation control.
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. Each viable improvement path is scored against your prioritized strategic, business-process, and technical needs and rolled into a side-by-side comparison. 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 – 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.
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 – 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.
