How Long Should Your ERP or CRM Implementation Really Take?
Vendors quote timelines that assume clean data, a fully staffed project team, and no scope changes. None of those three things are true on a typical mid-market…
Vendors quote timelines that assume clean data, a fully staffed project team, and no scope changes. None of those three things are true on a typical mid-market implementation.
We've reviewed dozens of post-mortems across platforms, and the pattern holds regardless of vendor: the quoted timeline is a best-case scenario, not a realistic estimate.
The vendor's timeline is the floor, not the estimate
Whatever number is in the proposal, add contingency for data cleanup and for at least one round of "wait, we also need this" scope discovery. It happens on almost every project.
A reasonable rule of thumb: multiply the vendor's quoted timeline by 1.3 for a realistic internal planning estimate, and communicate that adjusted number to leadership rather than the vendor's original figure.
Parallel-run longer than feels necessary
Teams that ran the old and new systems in parallel for a full business cycle — not just a few weeks — caught far more edge cases before they became production incidents.
A "full business cycle" means whatever your slowest recurring process is — a month-end close, a quarterly inventory count, an annual compliance filing. Skipping that cycle in the parallel run is how edge cases turn into year-one surprises.
What actually shortens a timeline safely
The only reliable lever we've seen work is reducing scope, not adding resources. Throwing more consultants at a fixed scope rarely compresses a timeline proportionally — it mostly adds coordination overhead.
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