7 Brilliant Tips Before You Pick Software – A Guide from the Center of Excellence

By the WM Synergy Center of Excellence

You walk into the meeting ready to talk ERP. New system, better data, cleaner operations. The timing feels right. Everyone in the room agrees it’s time for a change.

And then — about ten minutes in — something shifts.

Someone mentions that your product structures are complicated. Another person points out that their team defines a process completely differently than another department does. A third person brings up the workaround they’ve been using for three years that nobody ever documented.

Suddenly, what started as a conversation about software has become something much bigger. And that feeling — that uncomfortable realization that you’re not quite sure where to start — is actually one of the most important signals a manufacturing organization can receive.

It means the real work is beginning.

The Assumption That Derails Most ERP Projects

Most manufacturers assume the ERP journey starts with software selection. You identify the shortcomings in your current system, you demo a few platforms, you make a decision, and you get to work.

The problem is that this approach skips over the most critical phase of the entire process — understanding how your business actually operates before you try to configure a system around it.

ERP systems don’t fix broken processes. They shine a very bright light on them.

If your product structures are unclear, a new ERP will make that confusion harder to ignore — not easier to manage. If your teams define key workflows differently, a new system will force a reckoning that should have happened long before go-live. And if your data isn’t trustworthy going in, it won’t be trustworthy coming out.

The most important ERP work happens before an implementation project even exists.

How Flexibility Becomes Complexity

Growing manufacturers often find themselves in a particular kind of trap.

In the early years, flexibility is a competitive advantage. You customize your systems, build workarounds, and develop processes that support a wide range of product variations and customer requirements. And it works — until it doesn’t.

Over time, that flexibility quietly turns into complexity. Product structures become difficult to manage. Data becomes harder to trust. Operations become harder to scale. And when someone finally says they need a new ERP, what they’re often really saying is: they need to understand their own business well enough to run it on a modern system.

That’s a different conversation. And it’s a much more valuable one.

Every ERP journey passes through three stages:

Stage 1 — Flexibility. Systems and processes built to support growth and variation. Fast and adaptive, but often undocumented.

Stage 2 — Complexity. When that flexibility starts creating more friction than freedom. Data inconsistencies, departmental silos, and workarounds that have become the norm.

Stage 3 — Clarity. The goal that should precede any technology decision. Understanding how the business actually operates and how it should operate going forward.

The WM Synergy Center of Excellence exists to help manufacturers get to Stage 3 — before a single line of configuration is written.

What the CoE Does — And When We Show Up

The CoE doesn’t just support ERP implementations. We help organizations prepare for them.

Sometimes that means working alongside an implementation team during go-live. But often, the most impactful engagements happen before a Statement of Work is ever written — before the project officially begins.

Our role is to ask the questions that unlock the conversations everyone knows need to happen. To help organizations surface what they actually know about how they operate, identify where the gaps are, and create clarity around how their products, processes, and decisions should be structured going forward.

Because there’s a principle that drives everything we do:

“You cannot configure what you do not understand.”

If you don’t understand your own processes well enough to describe them clearly, you can’t design a system to support them. Jump straight to configuration without doing the foundational work, and you end up with a very expensive, very modern version of the same problems you had before.

Two Tools That Change the Conversation

Once an organization commits to doing the foundational work, two tools consistently prove their value.

Business Process Mapping

Before designing a new system, you have to understand the current one — not as it exists in policy documents or org charts, but as it actually operates day to day.

Business Process Mapping (BPM) does exactly that. It helps teams step back and visualize how work flows through the organization: where decisions get made, where workarounds have become standard practice, where bottlenecks quietly slow everything down.

This isn’t documentation for its own sake. It’s alignment. When everyone can see how work actually moves through the business, you can have honest conversations about what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change before a new system enters the picture.

The cost of skipping this step is steep. Organizations that go straight to configuration often find themselves recreating the same inefficiencies inside a brand-new ERP — at significant expense, with very little to show for it.

DiSC Collaboration Sessions

ERP initiatives are organizational change projects, not just system projects. And organizational change requires people from very different departments — with very different priorities, communication styles, and ways of making decisions — to get aligned and stay aligned through a long, complex process.

That’s where DiSC comes in.

DiSC helps teams understand how each person in the room thinks, communicates, and approaches decisions. It surfaces potential friction points before they become actual conflicts. And it gives cross-functional groups a shared framework for having difficult conversations productively rather than defensively.

When people understand how each other works, alignment happens faster. And when alignment happens faster, transformation becomes far more achievable.

The Champion Question

There’s one more ingredient that separates successful ERP initiatives from stalled ones, and it has nothing to do with software.

Every transformational project needs a champion inside the organization — someone who understands the business deeply, can connect departments across the org, and has the credibility and commitment to guide decisions when conversations get difficult.

This person isn’t necessarily the project manager or the IT lead. They’re the individual who knows where the bodies are buried, who has the trust of multiple departments, and who cares enough about the outcome to keep pushing when momentum starts to stall.

Identifying this person early — before the project is fully defined — is one of the highest-leverage moves an organization can make.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Lucid Bots, an innovative robotics company, recently went through the CoE’s BPM process as part of their transition to Acumatica. Here’s how their CFO & EVP, Chris Nobili, described the experience:

“Going through the BPM process with WM Synergy’s Center of Excellence was an invaluable experience for our team. It gave us the opportunity to step back and truly evaluate our current workflows, helping us uncover inefficiencies and capture critical opportunities we hadn’t previously considered. The structured approach made it easy to align on best practices for our transition to Acumatica, ensuring we have a clear roadmap moving forward. Beyond the BPM, the implementation team has been exceptional — guiding us through the transition with expertise, particularly as we work through key integrations to ensure a seamless system.”
Chris Nobili  |  CFO & EVP, Lucid Bots

About Lucid Bots: Innovative robotics company partnering with WM Synergy CoE on their Acumatica transition. Their BPM engagement mapped critical workflows and uncovered key operational opportunities ahead of go-live.

That’s what the foundational work looks like when it’s done well. Not a box-checking exercise — a genuine shift in how an organization understands itself, before it tries to configure a system around that understanding.

Starting the Conversation the Right Way

If you’re thinking about an ERP change — or you’re already in the middle of one and something feels off — the answer probably isn’t to move faster. It’s to step back and make sure the foundational questions have real answers.

What does your current process actually look like, not on paper, but in practice?

Where do your departments see things differently from each other?

Who inside your organization is going to champion this through the hard moments?

The WM Synergy Center of Excellence helps manufacturers work through exactly these questions — with your processes, your people, and your strategy at the center of the discussion.

Because the key to any successful ERP journey isn’t the software. It’s understanding the business first.

Ready to start the conversation the right way?

Reach out to your WM Synergy customer success manager, or watch our short overview video to learn more about how the CoE works.