Automation without a six-month engagement: why an ERP implementation fails

That sounds like an oversimplification, but the figures behind a ERPThe system where your accounting, inventory, purchasing and sales come together.—trajectory confirm the pattern. Dutch companies, governments and households invested €35.5 billion in ICT together in 2024 — 15.5 percent of all investments in the Netherlands, an increase of 4.2 percent compared to a year earlier, according to the CBS report Digitalization and the Knowledge Economy 2025. A substantial portion of that money goes to projects that never deliver what they promised. Here’s why, and which approach actually works for a company with 10 to 250 employees.

Why ERP implementations fail in small and medium-sized businesses

In practice, three causes keep coming up, whether it’s a completely new ERP package or a major module added on top:

• The process was never really documented. Everyone knows their own piece, but nobody has the exceptions written down. The implementation partner fills the gaps with assumptions, and every wrong assumption becomes a change request — with an invoice to match.
• There’s no fixed price, just an estimate. An hourly rate of €95 to €175 with an estimate of the number of hours is not a fixed-price agreement. In that case, overruns aren’t the supplier’s risk — they’re yours.
• No one owns the result. A steering committee of four people is not an owner. Without someone to make the call on scope, every discussion takes one meeting longer than it needs to.

The result: a project that takes six months on paper often stretches to nine to fourteen months in practice — and grows along the way with every new request that wasn't scoped out in advance.

What a failed ERP implementation really costs

Calculate based on a company with 60 employees that starts an ERP trajectory with an estimated budget of €120,000 and a planned duration of six months. If it runs three months over — not uncommon — this is added in practice:

• Two internal project members, an extra 16 hours a week, for three months, at an internal hourly rate of €65: €27.000
• One external consultant, two extra days a week, for three months, at €950 per day: €24.700

Clean up together €51.000 in additional costs for a three-month overrun — on top of the original budget, and before the system is actually being used by everyone. That leads straight to the second bill: a system that doesn't fit the way people work after delivery is often partly shifted back to Excel in practice — leaving you back where you started, only worse off.

Automation without a six-month engagement: how does it work?

The alternative is not 'less digitalization', but starting smaller: not replacing the entire business process, but letting the systems you already have — AFASDutch ERP package for administration, HR and payroll. Many SMBs have their single source of truth in it. such as Exact Online for administration, Microsoft 365 for the rest — communicate with each other. A customer name that you now type in twice only needs to be entered once after an integration.

The four agreements to establish in advance

Whether you have an integration built or automate it yourself, these four agreements prevent most of the delays typical of an ERP project:

1. Which system is the source of truth. When two systems have the same customer, one has to take precedence in a conflict. Decide that in advance, not during the first outage.
2. A fixed price, not an estimate. Ask for an amount, not a range with a caveat. If the supplier can’t give you one, the process hasn’t been discussed thoroughly enough.
3. Who provides the exceptions. Ten real orders from the past month, including the odd ones. Every exception you identify in advance is cheaper than the same exception afterward.
4. What happens in the event of delays or a standstill. Agree who is first to hear that a connection has stopped working, and what happens if a deadline is missed. See also Connect for management and monitoring.

Step-by-step plan: from self-assessment to a working connection

1. Week 1: self-assessment. Ten questions, two minutes, an initial picture of where time is leaking away. Free via the self-assessment.
2. Week 1–2: choose one process. Not “everything,” but the flow causing the most pain — often quote → order → invoice, or work order → administration.
3. Week 2: document exceptions. Ten real cases from the past month, including the odd ones.
4. Week 2–3: fixed price and delivery time. Based on the process and exceptions, a price between €3.500 and €12.000, with a firm delivery date.
5. Week 3–6: build and test. Using real exceptions as test cases, not only after the fact.
6. From week 6: maintenance. Someone who notices when a connection goes down — from €29 per month — instead of your customer being the first to notice.

Six weeks instead of six months. What that looks like in practice for an integration between AFAS and Exact is explained in Connecting AFAS and Exact in practice; the broader approach for every combination of systems in the complete guide to connecting systems in SMEs.

When do you need a new system after all?

Not every problem can be solved with an integration. A new package makes more sense if your company has grown so much that your current software has reached its ceiling in terms of number of users or functionality, if a merger or acquisition brings together two completely different system landscapes, or if the problem is not in the integration but in the underlying system itself — for example accounting software that simply doesn't scale. If you're unsure which category you fall into, then the math behind the cost of digitalization in SMEs an initial direction, or see what our areas of expertise exactly entail.