7 Questions Before Hiring an ERP Consultant

Discover the crucial questions before hiring an ERP consultant to ensure success in choosing the right ERP business consultant. Improve your decision-making with expert tips on ERP selection, experience checks, and change management strategies.

Introduction

Most manufacturers do not hunt for an ERP consultant on a calm day. They start after a late shipment, a bad close, or a plant schedule that lives on a whiteboard instead of in the system. 


By then, the pressure is high. That is when bad hiring choices happen. A stressed company often picks the person who sounds most sure. In this field, confidence is cheap. 


The seven questions below are the ones every manufacturer should ask before hiring an enterprise resource planning consultant. They are not tricks. They are there to make the consultant show you how they work before you pay enough to make leaving hard. 

Importance of ERP Consulting for Manufacturers

An ERP system is not a simple software buy. It is a choice about how your company will run for the next decade. It affects who sees what, when a job starts, how a part is costed, and what the owner sees on the first Monday of the month. A good enterprise resource planning consultant helps you decide what the tool should do. 


The software vendor sells the tool. The ERP consultant helps you decide what the tool should do. 


That is why the consultant matters more than the logo on the license. Along the way, we have seen two similar manufacturers buy the same system in the same year. One runs it with a small team and closes the books in four days. The other is still using parallel spreadsheets after a second attempt. The software was the same. The guidance was not. 


Good consulting earns its fee in three places. It shortens the gap between go-live and real trust. It prevents costly changes that make future upgrades painful. And it keeps your own people involved so the know-how stays in your building after the invoices stop. 

Key Considerations When Hiring an ERP Consultant

Before you interview anyone, it helps to follow a fixed order. Manufacturers who do this tend to hire well. Manufacturers who skip around tend to hire twice. 

First, price your current state: Put a number on what the mess costs you today. Add expedite freight, overtime, scrap, missed ship dates, and the hours your controller spends rebuilding reports. Know this number before any sales pitch. 

Second, define what winning looks like: Choose three results you can explain to your banker in one sentence each. Inventory accuracy at a set rate. On-time delivery at a set rate. A close that finishes in a set number of days. Vague goals make vague projects. 

Third, judge the fit, not the shine: You want someone who has stood in a plant like yours and lived through the second month after go-live, when the buzz is gone and the hard work starts. 

Fourth, check your own readiness: Who on your team will own this? Does that person have the time? No consultant can provide internal ownership for you. 

Hold those four in order and the seven questions below get easier to score. 

1) What is your experience with ERP implementations?

Start here and listen for details, not volume. The number of projects a firm has done matters less than the shape of those projects. You want an ERP manufacturing consultant who has worked with companies like yours: make-to-order or make-to-stock, long routings or short, one plant or many, regulated or not. 

Ask how many ERP projects the person in front of you has personally led, not how many the company has sold. In this field, the name on the proposal is often not the name that shows up on your floor. Ask who will be assigned to you, meet that person, and ask what else they are working on during your timeline. 

Then ask the question that separates seasoned from merely available. Ask about a project that went badly and what changed after it. Anyone with fifteen years in this work has a failure. The best ones will tell you about it plainly and explain what they do now. The ones who claim a perfect record are either new or not honest. 

2) Which ERP Systems Are You Proficient In?

There is a common practice here: some firms resell one system (like Essential Software Solutions), and some firms say they know fifteen systems well. Both answers should slow you down. 


Ask which systems they implement, how many projects they have done on each in the last two years, and what their formal link is to each vendor. Ask what commission or partner status they have. A reseller link is fine if you know about it. The risk is finding out after you accept the recommendation. 


Then ask a better question. Ask when they would tell a manufacturer that a system they sell is the wrong fit. For an ERP selection consultant, that answer matters. A consultant who can answer that has judgment. A consultant who cannot has a catalog. 

As a Gold Channel Infor ERP partner, we bring deep expertise to your questions about ERP but we also recognize that Infor may not be the right fit for every organization. Our ERP consultants prioritize your business needs first. If another solution is better suited, we will guide you there.

3) How Do You Approach Business Needs Assessment?

This is the question that predicts project outcome more than any other. Software gets built to fit a process. If nobody checks the process, the system will be built to fit a guess. 

Listen for real steps. A serious consultant will say they walk the floor, trace one order from quote to cash and one part from receiving to shipment, and talk to the people who enter the data, not just the people who read the reports. They will ask for your bills of material and routings, and they will tell you plainly what shape the data is in. 

Ask how long the assessment takes and what document you get at the end. You want a written record of your needs that belongs to you, in language your supervisors can read, before any setup starts. Ask one more thing: how do they tell the difference between a process you should keep because it is a real edge and a process you should drop because it is only a habit? Manufacturers spend huge sums to automate habits. A good consultant will talk you out of that. 

4) Can You Provide Client References or Case Studies?

Ask for three references, and ask for a specific kind. You want a manufacturer of similar size, in similar production, who went live at least eighteen months ago. Recent go-lives are still in the honeymoon. The truth shows up in year two. 

When you call, do not ask if they were happy. Ask what surprised them. Ask how the project cost compared with the first estimate, and what caused the gap. Ask how the consultant acted during the worst week. Ask whether the same people who sold the work did the work. Ask whether they would hire the firm again, and then stay quiet long enough for a real answer. 

If a firm cannot give references like this, that tells you something. If the references cannot remember the project clearly, that tells you something too. 

Download the guide: Questions to Ask ERP References

This is a practical checklist designed to help manufacturers ask the right questions when speaking to ERP reference customers. This document will also help you to cut through sales talk and focuses on what actually matters in real operations: performance, scheduling, implementation, support, and whether the system really works on a live shop floor. 

Download the document

5) What is Your Approach to Change Management?

Almost every ERP failure on the online resources look like a software problem at the first glance. Almost none were. The system worked. The people around it did not change how they worked, so bad data went in, and a system fed bad data will embarrass you on schedule. 


Ask the consultant what they do about that. The answer should include training built around each role, not one long session for everyone. It should include a plan for the shop floor, because a machinist and a controller need very different things. It should include how they handle the veteran employee who has done it the old way for twenty years and does not want to change. That person is often your most valuable person. The project will succeed or fail partly on whether they are treated as an asset or an obstacle. 


Ask who delivers the training, and how the knowledge moves to your team so you are not dependent on the consultant a year later. Independence should be part of the plan from day one. 

6) How Do You Ensure Post-Implementation Support?

Go-live is not the finish line. It is the moment your company starts learning what it bought. The weeks after go-live will bring a stream of small failures, and how fast those are fixed decides whether your people trust the system or drift back to spreadsheets. 


Ask what support looks like in the first ninety days, and get the answer in writing. How many hours are included? Who answers the phone? How fast do they respond when a production line stops, and how is that promise written in the contract? Ask whether support continues at the same rate later or changes to another setup. 


Ask about the handoff too. At some point the consultant leaves, and your team must be able to add a user, adjust a report, and close a month without help. Ask how the setup is documented and what training your internal owner gets. A consultant who is fine making themselves unnecessary is worth keeping. 

7) What Are Your Fees and Payment Structure?

Ask for the total cost of ownership over three years, written down. That should include software licenses, implementation hours, data migration, integrations, training, support, and the internal hours your people will spend. The last item is the one most manufacturers miss, and it is often the largest. 


Ask whether the engagement is fixed fee or time and materials, and what happens when the scope changes. Scope will change. What matters is that the change process is set in advance, in writing, with a named person who must approve it. Ask what is not included in the quote. Ask what a typical project of your size has gone over by, and by how much. 


Then look at the payment schedule. Milestones tied to delivered results are a good sign. A plan that puts too much weight up front is a reason to ask more questions. Finally, be careful with the lowest bid. In this trade, an oddly low number usually means the assessment has been cut, the training has been cut, or a junior consultant will be learning on your production floor at your expense. 

An Action Plan for Next 60 Days

Here is a plan you can start on Monday. It needs no software choice and no signature. 


  • Weeks 1 and 2:Count the cost. Put a dollar figure on the current state. Pull last year’s expedite freight, overtime, scrap, and late orders. Ask your controller how many hours go into the close. Write the total on one page. 
  • Weeks 3 and 4:Name the three wins. Choose three measurable results and write today’s number beside each one. If you cannot measure something today, that is your first finding. 
  • Weeks 5 and 6:Walk one order and one part. Follow one customer order from quote to cash, and one part from receiving to shipment. Note every place where information is retyped, printed, or kept in a private spreadsheet. This walk takes a day and teaches more than a month of meetings. 
  • Weeks 7 and 8:Interview three consultants with the seven questions above. Same questions, same order, for each firm. Score them. Call the references before you form an opinion, not after. 


At the end of sixty days, you will have something useful whether or not you hire anyone. You will have a priced problem, three defined goals, a mapped process, and a scored short list. That document keeps its value for years, and it changes the conversation with every consultant who walks through your door. 

Conclusion

The hardest part of this choice is not reviewing software. It is being honest about your own operation before an outsider is honest about it for you. The manufacturers who come through an ERP implementation well are almost always the ones who did that thinking first and hired a consultant to build on it, instead of hiring a consultant to supply it. 


So do the one thing that makes everything else easier. Write your Current State Brief. One page. The cost of the mess, your three goals with today’s numbers beside them, and the name of the person in your company who will own this project. Then bring that page to a single thirty-minute conversation with an ERP consultant and watch what they do with it. 


The ones who reach for a demo are selling. The ones who reach for your page are consulting. That difference is the whole decision, and one page is enough to see it.