Ask a chief financial officer what worries them before an ERP rollout, and the answer usually concerns the software. Will it do what the demonstration promised? Will the modules fit the business? These turn out to be the wrong worries.
A recent survey by Panorama found that software is rarely what breaks. Nearly three in four buyers now choose cloud systems, and of those, seven in ten opt for software-as-a-service (SaaS). Baseline functionality has become a commodity. The demonstrations, for the most part, deliver.
Table stakes
Projects come undone elsewhere. Around 30% of the organisations in Panorama’s survey ran over budget, and more than a fifth ran late; the reasons are instructive. The commonest cause of a blown schedule, cited by 58% of those who slipped, was organisational. Governance disputes, resistance to standardised processes and sign-offs that never arrived did more damage than any absent feature.
The report reserves its sharpest concern for change management. Fewer than a quarter of organisations (23.5%) reported an intense focus on preparing their people for new ways of working. Most treated it as a secondary matter, trusting that staff would adjust on their own. They frequently do not. As cloud platforms push out constant updates and redesigned screens, the accumulated weight of change wears users down, and the workarounds and shadow spreadsheets that follow slowly dissolve the very standardisation the system was bought to impose.
After the signature
The benefits that do materialise tell the same story from the other direction. Productivity gains, the most concrete and closely watched, reached 87% of the firms that expected them. The softer, slower rewards proved harder to bank. Benefits tied to new operating models arrived for only 41%. One number jumped, though. The share of organisations reporting they had dismantled their data silos climbed from 55% a year earlier to 77%, a lagging prize that tends to appear only once data governance and reporting standards have had time to bed in. Such gains are earned through disciplined execution. No amount of clever software conjures them on its own.
Taken together, the findings lead to an awkward situation for anyone about to sign an implementation contract. The choice of software matters less than the industry’s marketing implies. The choice of partner matters a great deal more. Once most modern systems can clear the functional bar, the differences that decide an outcome are the ones a capable partner brings: clear process ownership, honest scoping, the discipline to run change management in earnest and the readiness to stay in the room long after go-live. The most requested form of outside help concerns technology assessments, sought by 64% of those who engaged advisers. The fastest-growing requests were of a different character: business process management, organisational change management, and post-implementation benefits realisation. Buyers are learning where the risk actually lives.
The Asian premium
Few places sharpen that lesson like Asia. A company running one finance function across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan is running eleven overlapping implementations at once, each with its own tax code, statutory filings and commercial language. A template that runs cleanly in one market can fail quietly in the next.
The stakes are climbing. Cloud systems already make up more than 63% of ERP revenue across Asia-Pacific, and small and mid-sized firms are the fastest-growing buyers. The regional prize is substantial; the Asean Digital Economy Framework Agreement could add as much as US$2 trillion to Southeast Asia’s digital economy by 2030, and finance functions still assembled from market-by-market systems will struggle to claim their portion. The platforms have grown up to meet the moment, with NetSuite alone now serving more than 43,000 customers across 219 countries.
All of which makes the case for an implementation partner with genuine regional depth over a generalist with a polished deck. At PS Global Consulting, we have spent 18 years inside the NetSuite ecosystem across the Asia-Pacific market, which means the configuration problems a new client is about to encounter are usually ones we have met before. We treat localisation as a design decision made at the outset, built into the work for markets such as Indonesia, where DJP and Coretax reporting requirements shift beneath implementers’ feet, and Thailand, where Japanese-run regional enterprises bring their own governance expectations.
There is something freeing in all this. Were the software the hard part, buyers would be hostages to their vendors. Because the hard part is organisational, the result is largely theirs to shape. The right partner is simply the one who treats go-live as the beginning of the real work.
