Advice & Resources, Industry Insight
This article is part of a six-phase series on ERP implementation
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By Lee Clarke, Senior Business Director
– Last Updated: June 2026
ERP design phases fail without interim expertise because the decisions made at this stage are too consequential to leave to people who haven’t navigated them before. Gap analysis is where current-state operations meet the chosen platform – and where assumptions, if left unchallenged, get built into the system architecture. Once that happens, they are expensive to reverse and difficult to unpick.
The moment Design and Gap Analysis begins, something shifts. Discovery was about understanding the business. Vendor selection was about finding the right platform. But Design is where the two meet – where what the business actually does has to reconcile with how the chosen system actually works.
And that reconciliation is harder than most organisations expect.
Every function arrives with its own view of how things should be built. Every stakeholder surfaces requirements that weren’t part of the original scope. Every workshop has the potential to introduce decisions that will define how the business operates for years to come.
If those decisions get made without the right experience in the room, the consequences tend to be expensive, slow to surface, and difficult to undo.
This is why experienced ERP interim specialists add so much value at this stage – not as an add-on, but as a fundamental part of how good programmes are structured.
The most persistent risk during this phase is one that sounds almost counterintuitive: replicating what already exists.
Organisations know their current processes. Teams are comfortable with them. There’s an understandable instinct to treat the new ERP as a better container for the same way of working, rather than an opportunity to rethink it.
That instinct is often what limits the return on a substantial investment.
Experienced interim professionals do more than map current-state processes. They challenge them. They help leadership teams ask whether existing workflows actually make sense, or whether they’ve just accumulated over time because nobody stopped to question them. They surface where modern ERP functionality can do something better, and where the business needs to adapt rather than customise.
That distinction – between documenting the past and designing for the future – is where programmes either realise their potential or quietly underperform from the start.
ERP design involves almost every part of an organisation. Finance, procurement, operations, supply chain, HR, sales. Each function has different priorities. Each team comes to workshops with its own list of what matters most. Without the right structure, those conversations sprawl. Decisions that should be made in a single session get deferred. Competing priorities create friction that slows everything down, and clarity becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
Interim specialists with real ERP delivery experience know how to run these sessions properly. They guide workshops toward defined outcomes, keep discussions focused, and translate what stakeholders are asking for into something the system can actually support. They also bridge what is consistently one of the most important gaps in ERP programmes: the space between business language and technical reality.
When that gap doesn’t get bridged well, misalignment builds quietly through the design phase and surfaces loudly during testing or go-live.
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Not every gap between current-state operations and standard ERP functionality is a problem that needs solving. That distinction sounds simple, but in practice it’s one of the most valuable things an experienced interim brings to this phase.
Organisations under the pressure of a live programme tend to treat every discrepancy as urgent. Every difference becomes a design requirement. Every workaround from the old system becomes a feature request for the new one.
Interims with the right background can draw a clear line between what is genuinely business-critical – the gaps that reflect a real operational need – and what is simply familiar. Processes that have persisted not because they work particularly well, but because no one has had cause to change them.
Closing unnecessary gaps creates cost, complexity, and long-term maintenance burden. Closing the right ones creates a system that actually serves the business. Knowing which is which takes experience that most internal teams don’t have, not because of any limitation on their part, but because ERP programmes at this scale happen rarely.
Configuration and customisation deserve separate conversations, and they rarely get them.
Configuration works within the system’s standard capabilities. Customisation goes beyond them. The distinction matters significantly in terms of cost, implementation risk, and what the programme will look like to maintain and upgrade years down the line.
Internal teams, understandably focused on protecting how the business works today, can sometimes push toward customisation when configuration would be sufficient. Implementation partners, for their own reasons, don’t always push back as hard as they should.
Experienced interim support provides the independent perspective that keeps these decisions honest. They help leadership understand when standard functionality genuinely doesn’t meet a requirement, when configuration offers a practical middle ground, and when a request for custom development reflects preference rather than necessity.
Those calls have a direct bearing on budget, timelines, and the long-term health of the platform.
What gets decided during Design and Gap Analysis doesn’t just shape the implementation. It defines how the business will operate on the other side of it.
System usability, cost to maintain, ease of future upgrades, and the likelihood of genuine user adoption all trace back to choices made here. So do the timelines and budgets for every phase that follows.
Programmes that invest in experienced interim expertise during this stage – not as a response to problems already emerging, but as a deliberate structural decision – consistently move faster, make clearer decisions, and avoid the kind of complexity that becomes very difficult to unpick later.
At Broster Buchanan, we work with ERP programme teams at exactly this stage. We have access to a network of functional specialists, business analysts, and transformation interims who have led Design and Gap Analysis phases across multiple platforms and sectors. They know where assumptions typically go unchallenged, where workshops tend to drift, and how to keep a programme moving in the right direction when the complexity starts to build.
If you are heading into this phase, or already in it and finding it more complicated than expected, it is worth having a conversation about the interim talent currently available and how the right support could change the outcome.
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Lee Clarke – Senior Business Director
Technology & Business Transformation
