ERP consulting

ERP consulting is independent help choosing, planning and running an enterprise resource planning system: the software that ties together orders, purchasing, inventory, production, projects and finance in one database. It is for owners, CFOs, controllers and operations managers at small and mid-sized companies, such as manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers, contractors, retailers with several locations and service firms, who are outgrowing spreadsheets and a basic accounting file, or who already bought a system that never settled in. We map how work moves through your company, write the requirements, help you compare vendors and read their proposals, coordinate the implementation, clean and move your data, connect your other systems, test with real scenarios and train your people. Canada Create is a Toronto agency with an office at 126 Willowdale Avenue, serving companies across Canada.

Contents

• When an ERP makes sense, and when it does not yet
• Needs assessment and process map
• A requirements document vendors must answer
• Comparing vendors and reading their proposals
• Implementation planning and testing with real scenarios
• Data cleanup, migration and keeping your history
• Connecting the ERP to sales, ecommerce, shipping and accounting
• Training and change management on the shop floor and in the office
• Support after launch and an ERP health check
• Records, privacy and Quebec rules to plan for
• How an engagement with us runs
• What ERP consulting costs
• Choosing an ERP consultant
• Your next step

When an ERP makes sense, and when it does not yet

The most useful thing an ERP consultant can tell some companies is to wait. An ERP is a large change: every order, purchase, receipt, count and invoice starts flowing through one system, and every department has to agree on how. If your company runs one location, sells a modest catalogue, buys from a handful of suppliers and closes the month without drama, a well set up accounting file plus a CRM and a few good integrations may serve you for years. Our first conversation is about whether you are there yet.

Signs you are outgrowing your current setup

• Inventory counts in the warehouse never match the numbers in the accounting file, and nobody trusts either.
• Sales reps promise ship dates without seeing stock, open purchase orders or the production schedule.
• Job costs on a construction or service project are only known weeks after the work is done, when the bills arrive.
• The month end close depends on one controller rebuilding the same spreadsheet from several exports.
• You added a second warehouse, a second store or a second company, and stock transfers live in email.
• Bills of materials, routings and labour time for a manufactured part sit in a binder or in one planner’s head.

Signs an ERP would be premature

Your processes change every quarter because the business model is still settling. Nobody on staff can give the project steady hours. The real pain sits in one place, for example lead follow up or quoting, which a smaller fix can solve. Or the data in your current tools is so inconsistent that it has to be cleaned first no matter what you buy. In those cases we say so plainly and suggest the smaller step, whether that is cleaning the item list, linking your existing tools through API integration between the systems you already run or setting up a CRM for the sales side.

Needs assessment and process map

Most ERP projects that go over budget were under described at the start. The needs assessment is where we write down how your company actually works today, in the words your staff use, before any vendor gets a chance to show a demo.

The flows we map

• Order to cash: how a quote becomes an order, how stock is reserved, how orders are picked, packed and shipped, how invoices go out and how payments are applied.
• Procure to pay: who can raise a purchase order, how approvals work, how receipts are checked against the order and the supplier bill, and how bills are paid.
• Inventory: locations, bins, units of measure, lot or serial tracking, cycle counts, returns to stock and write offs.
• Production: bills of materials, work orders, routings, labour and machine time, scrap and finished goods.
• Projects and jobs: estimates, budgets, change orders, progress billing, holdbacks and job costing for contractors and service firms.
• Finance: the month end close, intercompany entries, currency, sales tax handling and the reports the CFO and the bank ask for.

What the map shows you

The process map is a set of plain diagrams and notes, one per flow, showing each step, who does it, which system or spreadsheet holds the information and where things break. Owners are often surprised by how many times the same order gets typed: once in the quote, again in the order spreadsheet, again in the accounting file and again on the packing slip. Those retyping points become the first list of what the new system must remove. The map also shows which steps are truly unique to your company and which are habits nobody chose, which matters a great deal when you later decide how much customization to pay for.

A requirements document vendors must answer

Demos are designed to impress. A requirements document turns the process map into a list of specific needs that every vendor must answer in writing, so you compare answers instead of presentations.

What goes into it

• Must have and nice to have needs, written as situations: “a customer orders a pallet quantity, we ship partial, back order the rest and invoice twice”.
• Volumes in plain words: the number of items, locations, users and orders the system must handle comfortably.
• Reporting needs, such as stock by location, open orders by customer, job profit by project and aged receivables.
• Integrations the system must support with your CRM, online store, shipping carrier accounts, payroll and banking.
• Bilingual needs for Quebec staff or customers, Canadian sales tax handling and currency needs if you buy or sell abroad.
• Security and access needs: who may see costs, who may approve purchases and who may change prices.

Why it protects your budget

When a need is not written down, it shows up after the software is signed, usually as a change request. A clear requirements document lets each vendor or reseller price the real scope, and gives you something to point at when a proposal skips a need or quietly moves it into a later phase.

Comparing vendors and reading their proposals

We stay vendor neutral. The choice of product stays yours, made against your own requirements. Our role is to help your team run a fair comparison and understand what you are being offered.

Running the comparison

• A short list built from your requirements, your company size and the way your industry works, rather than from advertising.
• Scripted demos: each vendor walks through your own scenarios with your own sample items and customers, in the same order, so your team can compare like with like.
• Reference questions to ask other companies running the same system at a similar size.
• A scoring sheet your team fills in after each demo, so the decision is not made by whoever spoke last.

Reading the proposal line by line

ERP proposals mix several kinds of cost: software subscriptions or licences, implementation services, customization, data migration, training and yearly support. We help you see which items are fixed and which are estimates, which assumptions the vendor made about your data and your staff time, what is left out, how change requests are priced and what happens to your data if you ever move off the system. Software licences and subscriptions are always paid to the vendor; our fees are separate and quoted in writing.

Implementation planning and testing with real scenarios

Once a system is chosen, the vendor or reseller usually configures it. We sit on your side of the table, coordinating the project so your team, the vendor and any other suppliers work from one plan.

What the implementation plan covers

• Phases in an order that suits your business, for example finance and inventory first, production or projects second.
• Decisions your company must make and who makes them: item numbering, warehouse locations, approval limits, costing method, price lists.
• The staff time needed from each department, written down early so the busiest people are not surprised.
• A cutover plan: when old systems stop taking new entries, when opening balances and open orders move, and who checks them.
• A short list of risks and what the team will do if one of them happens.

We do not promise go live dates, cost savings or efficiency gains. Dates depend on decisions, data quality and staff availability, and we keep those visible so the owner can see what is holding the project up.

Testing that uses your real work

Testing is where ERP projects are saved or sunk. We write test scenarios from the process map and have the people who do the work run them: a rush order with a partial shipment, a supplier delivering short, a customer return with a credit, a work order that uses a substitute material, a change order on a job, a month end close on test data. Each scenario has an expected result. Problems are logged, fixed by the vendor and run again before anyone agrees to launch.

Data cleanup, migration and keeping your history

Bad data is the quiet reason many ERP launches go wrong. A new system will happily accept duplicate customers, three spellings of the same supplier and items with no unit cost, and then produce reports nobody believes.

Cleaning before moving

• Customer and supplier lists merged, with duplicates resolved and inactive records marked.
• Item lists reviewed: consistent numbering, descriptions, units of measure, costs and reorder points.
• Bills of materials and routings checked against what the shop actually builds.
• Open sales orders, purchase orders, receivables and payables reconciled before cutover.
• Opening stock confirmed by a count, not copied from the old file.

What history to bring

Not every transaction from the last decade needs to live in the new ERP. Many companies move open items, opening balances and a set period of summary history, and keep the full detail of the old system in a readable archive. Whatever you choose, the old records must stay available for as long as you are required to keep them, so the plan names where the archive lives, who can open it and how it is backed up. Your accountant should agree to the cutover approach before it happens.

Connecting the ERP to sales, ecommerce, shipping and accounting

An ERP rarely replaces everything. Most companies keep a CRM for sales, an online store, carrier accounts for shipping, a payroll provider and a bank, and those all need to exchange data with the ERP without retyping.

Common connections

• CRM to ERP: won deals becoming sales orders, and order status and invoices visible to sales reps. When your CRM is CS+, the CRM we set up, we connect it to the ERP the same way.
• Online store to ERP: orders flowing in, stock levels and prices flowing out, so the store never sells what is not on the shelf.
• Shipping: labels, tracking numbers and freight costs written back to the order.
• Accounting: when finance stays in a separate accounting system, invoices, bills and payments posted to it on a schedule your controller approves.
• Banking and payroll files exchanged in the formats your providers accept.

Deciding which system owns which data

For each piece of data, one system must be the master. Prices might be owned by the ERP, customer contacts by the CRM, web product descriptions by the store. Writing those choices down prevents the most common integration fault: two systems overwriting each other. For the deeper technical work of building and monitoring these links, see our page on connecting business systems through APIs. Where a sales team wants automated follow up on quotes once the ERP data is flowing, sales follow up automation covers that side.

Training and change management on the shop floor and in the office

An ERP changes daily habits. A picker scans instead of ticking a sheet, a buyer raises purchase orders in the system instead of by email, a project manager logs change orders the day they are agreed. If those habits do not change, the system fills with gaps and the old spreadsheets come back.

Training by role

• Short sessions for each role, built around the tasks that person does every day, using your own items and customers.
• Written guides with screenshots for the ten or so tasks each role repeats most.
• Key users in each department who learn the system more deeply and answer first questions from colleagues.
• A separate session for managers on the reports and approvals they now own.

Managing the change

People resist an ERP for understandable reasons: it shows work that used to be invisible, it adds steps to some jobs and it removes the spreadsheets they built and trusted. We help owners explain why the change is happening, involve the people who do the work in testing, retire old files on a set date and listen to complaints in the first weeks, because many of them point to a real setup problem worth fixing.

Support after launch and an ERP health check

The weeks after launch bring a wave of questions, small fixes and reports nobody thought to ask for. We stay involved to sort issues with the vendor, adjust settings that do not fit and keep the list of open items moving.

An ERP health check for systems already live

Many companies call us years after an implementation, when the system is live but disappointing. A health check reviews how the ERP is set up against how the company works now: which modules are paid for and unused, where staff have built workarounds in spreadsheets, which reports are wrong and why, how clean the item and customer data is, whether user access still matches roles, and whether integrations are failing quietly. You receive a written report with findings in order of impact and a plan, which may be fixes to the current system rather than a replacement.

Where IT and security fit

An ERP is only as reliable as the devices, network and accounts around it. General technology planning sits with our IT consulting for growing companies, ongoing support for staff devices with managed IT services, and access controls and account protection with cyber security work.

Records, privacy and Quebec rules to plan for

An ERP holds your books and records, customer details and often employee information, so a migration has rules attached.

Keeping books and records

The CRA requires businesses to keep books and records, generally for six years from the end of the last tax year they relate to. A migration plan must keep that history readable and retrievable, whether it moves into the new ERP or stays in an archive of the old system. Your accountant confirms what must be kept and in what form.

Personal information

Customer contacts, employee details and payroll data are personal information. In most provinces PIPEDA or a provincial privacy law applies to how it is collected, used and protected; in Quebec, Law 25 adds its own duties, such as privacy assessments for certain projects involving personal information. During a migration that means limiting who handles exports, deleting temporary copies and setting user access in the new system by role. This is a marketing observation, not legal advice.

How an engagement with us runs

We begin with a free review: a conversation with the owner and, ideally, the controller and operations lead about what hurts today, what you have already tried and whether an ERP is the right move. From there we send a written proposal for the stage that makes sense first, which is often the needs assessment and requirements, with our fees quoted in writing.

Stages you can take one at a time

• Readiness and needs assessment, ending with the process map and a recommendation.
• Requirements and vendor comparison, ending with a decision your team owns.
• Implementation coordination, data cleanup and migration, integrations and testing.
• Training, launch support and, later, a health check.

Every software account, licence and data export stays in your company’s name. We report on progress at agreed milestones and monthly while the project runs, in plain language a busy owner can read in a few minutes.

What ERP consulting costs

ERP consulting fees are quoted in writing after the free review, because scope varies widely between a distributor with one warehouse and a manufacturer with three plants. ERP software licences, subscriptions and the vendor’s own implementation services are paid to the vendor and shown separately from our fees.

What drives the fee

• How many flows are in scope: finance and inventory alone, or production, projects and service as well.
• The number of locations, companies and currencies the system must handle.
• The state of your data: a clean item list moves quickly, while years of duplicate customers and inconsistent units take real hours.
• How many integrations are needed and whether the other systems offer clean connections.
• How involved you want us to be: advice at key decisions, or day to day coordination with the vendor through launch.
• Training needs, including bilingual material for teams in Quebec.

A health check on a live system is usually a smaller, defined piece of work, and it is often the sensible first step when an ERP is already in place.

Choosing an ERP consultant

An ERP project touches every department, so the consultant you choose should be on your side of the table and honest about trade offs. Questions worth asking any firm:

• Do you resell or receive anything from any ERP vendor? Any adviser should answer this plainly and in writing.
• Who owns the accounts? The answer should be you: software accounts, admin logins, data exports and documentation all in your company’s name.
• Will you tell us if we do not need an ERP yet?
• How will you test the system with our own scenarios before launch?
• What will you need from our controller, our warehouse lead and our project managers, and when?
• How do you handle data history and records we are required to keep?
• What happens after launch if reports are wrong or staff fall back to spreadsheets?

If your challenge is mostly a sales process, a CRM may be the better place to start; our CRM setup and automation services cover that, and our page on CRM for manufacturers explains where a CRM ends and an ERP begins for a plant. When neither a packaged ERP nor a CRM fits a process that is truly unusual, a custom built CRM or custom software development may be part of the answer.

Your next step

Book a free ERP review with Canada Create. Bring your current list of systems and spreadsheets, a rough idea of order and item volumes and the three problems you most want solved, and we will tell you plainly whether the next step is an ERP, a smaller fix or a health check of the system you already have. Call (416) 273-9030, Monday to Friday, 9 am to 6 pm, and Saturday, 10 am to 2 pm. After hours, our 24/7 AI agent answers the toll-free line, +1 (800) 808-9235, and we’ll follow up the next business morning. You can also reach us through our contact page. We reply within one business day. You are welcome at our office at 126 Willowdale Avenue, Suite 3, Toronto, and you can read more about our agency before you call.