We Signed the ERP Contract. So Why Is Our Team Working 70-Hour Weeks?
It's one of the most common frustrations we hear from leaders mid-way through an Oracle or Workday rollout. The contract is signed, the implementation partner is engaged, and yet the internal team is buried.
ERP programs promise real organizational benefit, but they also carry real risk. Like any major investment, success comes down to how well leaders balance that benefit against the risk, and how wisely they staff the effort.
There's one investment that consistently helps leaders do both: bringing a client-side advocate into the staffing mix.
The Gap Nobody Talks About
In a typical ERP program, a company selects the vendor solution (Oracle, Workday, or otherwise), then brings on an implementation partner, often a System Integrator (SI), to deliver it. On paper, that looks like a two-party arrangement. In practice, it puts a heavy third burden on the company itself.
Internal teams are expected to engage at a deep level: providing requirements, sitting in on strategic and design decisions, overseeing configuration and build, and running the system through round after round of testing. And they're expected to do all of it while still keeping the business running day to day, and somehow finding time to get trained on the very system they're helping build.
Many organizations don't realize how much of this work is actually theirs until they're already in it. It isn't that no one read the contract. It's that the work effort behind the words was never fully understood.
That's the gap a client-side advocate is built to close: a resource engaged exclusively to protect the interests of the organization footing the bill, not the vendor's or the implementer's.
Where a Client-Side Advocate Actually Helps
Capacity. Design work is time-consuming, and it tends to land squarely on the people who can least afford to drop other responsibilities. Take the Chart of Accounts as an example. The SI will typically guide the Finance Manager or Controller through designing the new account structure, then configure it once design is final. But converting the old structure and historical values into the new one? That falls to Finance, usually on a tight deadline, usually while they're still closing the books and producing monthly reports. A client-side advocate can absorb that kind of design and conversion work, so your core team stays focused on running the business instead of chasing a second full-time job.
Expertise. For most organizations, this ERP program is the first (and hopefully only) one they'll ever run. In a company-and-implementer-only setup, the SI is expected to bring the software expertise while the company brings the institutional knowledge. When that institutional knowledge isn't backed by someone who's done this before, costly disconnects follow, especially in the areas packaged ERP was never built to solve on its own. In healthcare, that shows up in places like contingent nursing labor and physician compensation models, areas standard ERP configurations simply weren't designed to handle out of the box. A client-side advocate brings the pattern recognition to bridge that gap before it becomes a problem.
Accountability. When your SI hands you a delivery estimate or a recommendation, having someone in your corner with the experience to evaluate it changes the conversation. A client-side advocate advocates, plainly, holding the implementation partner to the solutions and timelines they committed to, not just the fastest path to go-live.
An Owner's Representative for Your ERP Program
The construction industry solved this problem a long time ago. Nobody builds a corporate headquarters without an Owner's Representative watching the general contractor on the owner's behalf. A multi-million dollar ERP program deserves the same protection.
At Solution Front, that's the role we step into: a client-side advocate embedded in your project team, absorbing capacity, contributing expertise, and holding the line on accountability, so your internal team can do their part of the work instead of all of it.
Are your teams feeling the strain of an upcoming or active ERP implementation? Let's talk about how Solution Front can help protect your investment.
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