By Kevin Moran, CRO, Broster Buchanan
There’s a pattern I see repeatedly in my conversations with finance and technology leaders. The ERP end of life date has been flagged, noted, and quietly set aside. Everyone in the room knows it’s coming. And then, when it finally forces its way onto the agenda, it arrives as an emergency.
That urgency is expensive. And in almost every case, it was avoidable.
Having spent my career in tech and business transformation recruitment, I’ve sat close to a lot of these programmes, from the early conversations through to delivery. The decisions made before a formal programme begins, often before a vendor has been briefed or a business case drafted, tend to define whether an ERP replacement succeeds or unravels. So it’s worth being deliberate about them.
When an ERP reaches end of life, the immediate framing is almost always technical. Support is ending. Security exposure is increasing. Maintenance costs are climbing. All of that is accurate.
But what organisations are actually confronting is a fundamental question about how they want to operate going forward.
ERP replacement touches the whole business: how processes run, how data is owned and used, how scalable the organisation is for growth or acquisition activity. Treating it as a system swap, even a complex one, is the most consistent mistake I see at this stage.
By the time end of life becomes a formal agenda item, risk has usually been accumulating quietly for some time. Unsupported systems create security vulnerabilities and operational fragility. Legacy maintenance costs rise as customisations and workarounds stack up over the years. Inflexibility becomes visible when the business tries to grow, restructure, or bring in a new entity and the system simply can’t keep up.
There’s also knowledge dependency, which catches organisations out more than almost anything else. Understanding of legacy platforms tends to sit with a small number of people. When those individuals move on, a meaningful amount of institutional knowledge disappears with them. In a market where experienced ERP talent is competitive, that’s a risk that’s easy to underestimate.
The longer the decision is delayed, the more costly and complex the eventual programme becomes. That’s not a general observation; it’s what the data from these programmes consistently shows.
The most common failure points I encounter at this early stage have very little to do with technology.
Delayed decision-making is the first. End-of-life dates rarely arrive as a surprise, but action is deferred until pressure makes it unavoidable. That compresses planning timelines, forces shortcuts in design and discovery, and hands leverage to vendors at precisely the moment when organisations should be in the strongest negotiating position.
Jumping to platform selection is the second. “Do we go SAP, Oracle, or D365?” is the question most organisations gravitate toward first. It’s the wrong starting point. The right question is: “What operating model does the business need for the next decade?” The technology should be chosen to serve the strategy, not the other way around.
Leadership misalignment is the third. Without genuine early alignment across the CFO, COO, CIO and functional leadership, programmes drift. Priorities pull in different directions. Scope expands or contracts without clear rationale. Decision-making slows at the moments when speed and clarity matter most.
And finally, the scale of change is consistently underestimated. ERP replacement changes processes, controls, reporting, data ownership and often roles. Recognising that early, and building a plan that accounts for it, is what distinguishes well-run programmes from the ones that become cautionary tales.
The organisations I’ve seen navigate this well tend to approach it with a different mindset. Rather than managing end of life as a constraint, they use it as a prompt to do things they should perhaps have done sooner.
It’s a genuine opportunity to simplify and standardise processes, modernise the technology stack, improve data quality and reporting, and reduce long-term technical debt. In private equity environments, it’s often the moment where infrastructure is brought to a standard that genuinely supports scalable growth rather than just keeping pace with it.
But capturing that opportunity requires structure and intent from the outset. The quality of the groundwork at this stage tends to define the quality of everything that follows.
From what I’ve seen, the programmes that go well have typically done a few things before entering formal discovery and planning.
They’ve defined the “why” with enough clarity that leadership can be held to it. The business drivers for change, the risks of inaction, and the value the programme is expected to create, articulated specifically rather than left as broadly understood.
They’ve established executive sponsorship that is active and accountable, not just nominal. With clear ownership across finance, operations and technology.
They’ve done high-level operating model thinking: where does the business need to standardise, and where does differentiation actually matter?
They’ve identified early risks: data quality issues, process complexity, capability gaps in the team that will need to be addressed before serious delivery work begins.
And they’ve brought in experienced ERP leaders early, often as interims or senior advisors, who have navigated similar transformations before, who understand where programmes go wrong, and who can accelerate decision-making at the stage when it has the most leverage.
Getting that foundation right reduces risk across every subsequent phase. Getting it wrong compounds it, reliably.
If your ERP is approaching end of life, it’s worth asking:
If you’re beginning to explore ERP replacement or want to talk through what good looks like at this stage, feel free to connect or message me. It’s a conversation I’m always glad to have.
Kevin Moran – CRO
kevinmoran@brosterbuchanan.com
