Deploying a Material Requirements Planning (MRP) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is often hailed as a transformative leap for businesses. But let’s not sugarcoat it: the road is rocky, and failures are all too common. From ballooning costs to frustrated employees, these projects can go sideways fast. Here’s why it happens — and what you can do to prevent it.

1. Not Defining Requirements Early and Comprehensively

Let’s be clear: you can’t build what you haven’t defined. Companies often dive into system selection without a crystal-clear understanding of their high-level needs. The result? A system that may look shiny but doesn’t fit.

What to Do: Before evaluating vendors, nail down what the system absolutely must do, the business processes it supports and who is in a position to make the decisions around those psocesses. Skip the nitty-gritty for now; focus on the big “what” rather than the “how.”

2. Skipping Proper Vendor/Product Evaluation

Vendors can be persuasive, but charm doesn’t solve process misalignment. Picking a vendor without scrutinizing how their product aligns with your actual needs leads to customization hell. A few dozen checkboxes isn’t an evaluation, that’s just the initial screening, but it’s where many organizations stop and base their final decisions.

What to Do: Vet vendors rigorously. Insist on demos, references, and concrete point-by-point proof of alignment with your requirements. Detailed walkthroughs with your data and test cases are essential. Don’t discount a vendor because they can’t do it “your way”, but look at how feasible it would be to do it “their way”.

3. Leaving Out the Real Experts

Senior leaders often make the decisions, leaving out the people in the trenches who actually do the work. This disconnect guarantees overlooked details and unmet needs.

What to Do: Engage frontline employees early. They’ll pinpoint issues you didn’t even know existed.

4. No Neutral Contract Negotiator

When requirements are fuzzy, contracts turn into black holes of vague deliverables and runaway costs. Without an objective third party, it’s a battle of conflicting interests. The vendor doesn’t understand your business and you don’t understand the tool, so you absolutely need someone in the middle to help connect the dots. A third party who is an expert in the space can help set process, milestones and expectations that will protect both parties from costly overruns

What to Do: Bring in a neutral expert to mediate contracts, scope, and expectations. It’s money well spent. Be careful to plan and negotiate around worst cases and not just a blue-sky implementation.

5. Skipping “How Does It Work” Training

Most organizations jump straight into mapping gaps and customizations without first understanding the logic behind the system’s design. That’s like trying to remodel a house you’ve never walked through. The systems you’ve chosen has almost certainly been used by hundreds or thousands of customer before you without making your specific changes. Find out how. You might learn a better way.

What to Do: Train key stakeholders on how the system works out of the box. Learn its strengths and quirks before deciding what to tweak. Focus on how you can support your business with the OOTB system and not on how you need to change the system to support your business.

6. Dragging Legacy Baggage Into the Future

If you cram old data and outdated processes into a new system, don’t be surprised when it breaks or becomes a transformation nightmare.

What to Do: Bring only what’s essential: customers, suppliers, catalogs, inventory, GL balances. Run parallel systems temporarily to organically close out open transactions in the old system and phase out old workflows without chaos.

7. No Dedicated Implementation Team

Part-time attention yields part-time results. Delegating implementation to people already swamped with other responsibilities slows everything down and almost gaurantees a long drawn-out process. Competing priorities draw focus from fully analyzing and understanding the issues and impact fast decision making.

What to Do: Assign a full-time team with decision-making authority. Let them focus exclusively on the project.

8. Lip Service from Leadership

When a crisis hits, “top priority” projects can suddenly become afterthoughts. That sends a loud message: this isn’t really important. Additionally, changing business process will inevitably meet with resistance. You absolutely will need to change your business to be successful. Any customization that you allow will set a precedent for more customization and exponentially increase your risk of breaking OOTB functionality and impacting your upgrade paths.

What to Do: Leadership needs to walk the talk. Keep the team shielded from distractions and support them when business process changes meet resistance. Make the business work on adapting the business processes to the OOTB product and treat customizations as an absolute last resort. (see below)

9. Customizing Everything

Trying to replicate your old system in a new one defeats the purpose of upgrading. Customizations are expensive and risky and should be avoided at all costs. Full leadership support on this point is critical (see above)

What to Do: Start with out-of-the-box functionality. Test workarounds before jumping to customizations. Less is more.

10. Chasing “Best-in-Class” Tools

The “best” tool for every function often leads to a Frankenstein’s monster of disconnected systems. An MRP/ERP deployment is the perfect opportunity to centralize data and workflows under one umbrella and start to eliminate “one-trick-ponies” from your environment.

What to Do: Prioritize OOTB functionality and native integration. A “good enough” tool that fits seamlessly beats “best” tools that don’t talk to each other.

11. Micromanaging Vendors

You hired experts, not interns. Hovering over their work wastes your time and erodes trust. It also reduces your ability to hold them accountable when you don’t allow them to manage their own work and deliverables. Nothing will invalidate a fixed-price contract faster than micromanaging your contractors.

What to Do: Set clear milestones and hold them accountable. Then step back and let them deliver.

12. Too Many Cooks (or Vendors)

Multiple vendors mean more handoffs, miscommunication, and finger-pointing.

What to Do: Consolidate vendors wherever possible. Designate a single “general contractor” to manage the project and map out the lines of communication and accountability. Not everything needs to flow through you.

13. Treating Testing as a Formality

Rushed or superficial testing leads to faulty assumptions, wasted effort, and costly rework. Using “any available warm body” to do testing instead of trained/skilled testers will gaurantee that your testing is superficial. Testing is an overlooked professional skill and not something that everyone is capable of.

What to Do: Put skilled testers in charge of the process. Test early, often, and thoroughly. Validate assumptions at every stage.

14. Ignoring Data Quality

Bad data is like bad fuel — it gums up the works. Poorly cleansed legacy data leads to errors and inefficiencies.

What to Do: Audit, clean, and validate data before migration. In most organizations, this will be a significant effort. Make this a separate project if needed. Remember that a new system isn’t going to magically fix bad data.

15. Poor Change Control

Scope creep and endless revisions are the death knell of many implementations.

What to Do: Establish a solid change control process. Evaluate every change request for its impact and necessity. Track the reasons for the change request to better understand how to improve future requirements, product selections, testing and implementations

The Bottom Line

Deploying an MRP/ERP system is no small feat, but failure isn’t inevitable. By addressing these common pitfalls head-on, you can save time, money, and sanity. The key? Planning, communication, and a relentless focus on doing things right the first time.

What challenges have you faced during an MRP/ERP deployment? Let us know in the comments.