Anyone have advice for convincing a company's management that they need to stop trying to re-invent the wheel and go with an ERP? It seems like ordinarily it only ever works out if the company has an accounting team pushing for it, or if the major c-suite stakeholders are already on board with the idea. I've been a netsuite consultant and integrator off and on over my career, and so coming from that experience it's frustrating watching SMBs drag their feet over this stuff. I'd be fine with SAP or MS Dynamics or whatever we go with, just as long as they stop trying to get us to build our own in-house

Best argument I've found is the auditors. Get the audit firm they use to outline all the different certifications their system would have to go through to pass muster, and what would happen if a material weakness was found in their homegrown system. If they're a fully private company, it can be a little trickier to make this argument, but it's basically along the same lines as that, except if/when you exit or IPO you're going to have to go through this same process, so why not do it now and enjoy the benefits in the meantime, versus having to do an implementation just for that purpose. Have actually seen a few companies that had to do implementations because auditors found material weaknesses in their homegrown systems.

Ha @James Morris you basically said what I was starting to type out. Great minds and all. I'd also toss in potential compliance issues. Audit and compliance issues often go hand-in-hand, but are not always the same. All the same arguments Jimbo makes also apply to any state or federal agencies that might audit you or you might have to submit reporting to. Maybe that doesn't apply to your company, but compliance audits are horrible if you don't have proper controls and reporting. Also a weaker argument, but still a good one is that due to the reasons above, you're likely going to have to go to an ERP sometime. Homegrown systems don't tend to last as companies get to any size. The sooner you do the ERP implementation, the less of a mess you'll have to sift through to prep data and processes to move over. And if you do that instead of a homegrown system right away, you won't have to go back and try to figure out what it's doing when you're moving to the ERP. tbh a homegrown ERP really only makes sense if you're in a highly specialized LOB. Most of the major ERPs can handle most use cases. Will it work perfectly? Of course not. But it's way better to be able to rely on established companies and software packages when (not if) there are issues, rather than having to find the people who built your homegrown package. Good luck

One more reason, though somewhat situational, is that many other companies and VCs will flat-out refuse to buy you or invest in you (at any price) if you're not already on a major ERP because of the risk that your financials could be misstated and it would be much harder to detect in discovery.

> you're likely going to have to go to an ERP sometime This has been my go-to argument so far. This company keeps assigning our little 5-person dev team (out of an 85-person company) projects to build things NetSuite and all other ERPs already do, and we have the classic setup of a hodgepod of SaaS apps compiled together to do what one instance would do for us with just a couple off-the-shelf modules. The company I'm at is Ride Health, and the LOB is not specialized. It's transportation where we have some in-house fleet vehicles but also a majority of third-party vendor fleets serving us, and we bill insurance companies on behalf of the passengers taking the rides. The only complication I foresee is we currently do an intensely manual process of consolidated invoicing. But I know NetSuite can achieve such things because I've personally worked on that kind of project before as the suitescript developer at a consultancy

Totally get where you're coming from, but that sounds a little more like those are all the reasons why it's good for you to implement an ERP and that's why it's maybe going to be a hard sell. I'd start by asking your CFO and CEO about their pain points, and adapting your argument as to why an ERP would solve their top problems better/easier/faster/cheaper. Keep the goal you want in mind, and remember that you're going for that, rather than "winning the argument". Changing someone's mind on any particular point is next to impossible. Changing your own argument is pretty easy.

Excellent points all around. Thank you

Throw HIPPA in the mix with other audit stuff. Since they are servicing end client for health reasons - it has to be HIPPA compliant. Tell them how much it is going to cost them to make their home grown solution to get HIPPA compliant. This build vs buy strategy sucks most of the time, I just quit my current job because of this and unwilling to do process change. I already got approval for NS partnership as solution provider and alliance partner.