Is ERP Dead? | with Gareth Bennett & John Ashworth

In the current world where there's maybe been a bit of an aversion to big-ticket multi-million ERP projects, given there have been some well-known disasters to be fair, is ERP dead? Today we sat down with John Ashworth, Finance Transformation Leader, currently leading a programme at the Crown Estate, and Gareth Bennett, who's leading with Finance Transformation at News We talked about, is the ERP dead? What do you do when you go live? And thoughts around leadership and change management on ERP programmes.

When I hear the word ERP, it invokes a connotation for me that is old, stuffy, slow-moving, transactional. I think people need to remember that ERPs are really for transformation. It does leave a legacy. It's making a big difference to business over the next 5, 10, 15 years.

And I think knowing that you're making a difference and that you're delivering something that will really change people's lives, the way the business operates, improve the quality and the efficiency of the business, and will have durability. John and Gareth have shared their experience of making these programmes a success, and hopefully you enjoy it. Good morning. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today.

Just as a starting point, could you give us a brief introduction as to who you are and what you do? Sure. Gareth Bennett. Really nice to be here.

Thank you for inviting me this morning. So I've most recently led a SAP implementation at News UK for the last couple of years. And I'm John Ashworth. Again, thank you for inviting me today.

I'm the Finance Transformation Director at the Crown Estate, and I'm just leading an ERP and finance transformation journey there, having just left Marks & Spencer's where I was leading their S4 HANA programme. Carolyn Cole. I'm one of the founding partners at Unity Advisory, and I specialise in helping CFOs and their teams modernise and digitise their functions. Thanks for having me.

Super. So we're kicking off today on the topic of ERP. And as a starting point, I'm interested to know, in the current world where there's maybe been a bit of an aversion to big ticket, multi-million ERP projects, given there have been some well-known disasters, to be fair, is ERP dead? It's a really good question.

When I hear the word ERP, it invokes a connotation for me that is old, stuffy, slow-moving, transactional. I think people need to remember that ERPs are really for transformation. They provide the platform for businesses to reinvent themselves. I think that's shift.

A couple of shifts for me certainly are. One is, traditionally, was the IT-led ERP moving to business-led ERP, which means we focus more on growth strategies, customer centricity, profits, cost optimisation, etc. Whereas it used to be an IT upgrade, focus on transactions, removing manual work. I think the other thing is the cloud side of things, going from traditional on-prem monoliths, where it was really hard to upgrade, really expensive to customise, where it's now cloud.

You look at SAP S4 HANA, you look at Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle Cloud, etc. Those create a platform for businesses to really transform. You said old, stuffy, and transactional. I thought you were describing myself for a second.

That's exactly how I am. I think ERPs are a very interesting point in evolution. I think they definitely have a purpose for big corporations. I think big corporations kind of like them and hate them in equal measure.

They're needed for organised data, which I think is increasingly important. They're good, obviously, typically around controls and structured processes and things, which I think big organisations like. But I think if you're a new or agile organisation, you're starting from scratch. I think, as we'll no doubt discover over the next period of time, there may be the day of the old ERP is certainly up for reimagination and reinvention.

How has it evolved? I think, for me, it's quite interesting. I spend more of my time with SAP than I have done with Oracle. But I think where SAP are heading is quite an interesting journey and an interesting evolution of how they see the future heading.

You have the transactional layer sitting there underneath. Then they have created this product called Business Data Cloud, which is an acknowledgement that data is probably the biggest value element within an ERP. Having that data, of course, is then the rich enabler for agentic AI and the use of AI. I think they are trying to position themselves as future relevant.

I think data is the heart and centre of that particular evolution for them. I do think it's fair. I think it's fair to say the ERP programmes do continue to be very long, expensive, hard initiatives. I think it leads us into what needs to be true for an ERP to kick off successfully.

Before the rubber hits the ground and you're on the clock, what are the non-negotiables you feel should be in place before you even think about kicking off in earnest? Looking across the ERP transformations that I've done in the past, I think there's a couple of factors that are really important. One is defining really what your business case is, what are the benefits and the pain points that you have behind you, and do those stack up such that then you really get buy-in from the sponsors and the leaders of the business.

When I say the sponsors, it's not just the people sitting on the steering committee or paying the money for this. It's also the ultimate customers of the system because you put something in that's just sat in finance or sat in one part of the business. The custodians have to deal with the queries and ultimately then you're looking at the parts of the business that are facing off to the customers externally potentially. That really can cause a lot of pain and chaos in the business.

The buy-in from all sides of the business is really critical. I think where I've seen things work really well also in the past is if you come into a program like this with process knowledge already there and an understanding of where your process sits today, how it operates, and what your requirements are. I think that really puts you in a good state to start a transformation where you might have a systems implementation partner, or you probably will, but rather than spending precious money trying to rehash old as is processes, get the people in the building to start focusing on that before.

I think the other thing then for me is what is the core leadership structure of the program before it starts? How do you dedicate resources from the business, from the tech teams, and from the program teams? I think it really works well when you've got an accountability model that you have representatives or people dedicated from all those facets working as you hit the ground and as you start working. I think a couple of builds for me, I think one of which is obviously choosing the right partner to work with.

It's a bit like any kind of relationship, you don't entirely know all their behavioral characteristics before you join, but making sure that that partnership is set up for success. I'm sure we're going to talk about that more as we move along. I think the other thing for me is be realistic in terms of your ambition. No one wants a jam tomorrow, project three years hence.

If you can break it out into manageable components where you can deliver value all the way along the journey, I think that makes a tremendous difference. We did that at BT very consciously. We had a very conscious strategy about which areas we wanted to deliver first, so we chose T&E because it was big impact across the whole business, but technically very easy to deploy. Then we went into imagined information because people really loved that, even though we were feeding the data from the old systems.

Then we back-ended it with some of the ledgers and some of the consolidation stuff. Think about your strategy and don't try and deliver it all in one go if you can't. If you can break it apart into meaningful components, then do that. How have you both, when it comes to, when you think about the ERP not just being kind of just a techie backbone to the bit, but it's actually an enabler of change, enabler of transformation, enabling the business to stay relevant.

How have you approached that end-to-end design and particularly elements of the end-to -end, I guess, business model that don't sit in the ERP, but ultimately need to be considered to ensure the ERP is structured and set up for success? How have you, because it ultimately comes down to governance, governance being clear what those decisions are and getting decisions made quickly. Like I said before, you go into building anything that obviously you can't go back on. How have you both individually made sure that that end-to-end design is thought about and you've got the right people around the table and making the decisions quickly?

I'm a huge enthusiast for a kind of process chain or process or global process ownership as a structure. I think most businesses don't organize themselves in process-centric ways. They tend to be traditional functional areas. Inevitably, you're going to have to reach out across departments and across functions.

I think a properly defined global process ownership structure is the right way to get that brokerage because you by definition and by default have to bring in people from different functions and you have to go beyond the edges of the core scope. You need to know what your inputs are and also what your outputs are on the other side as well. I think getting that right and having powerful global process owners with credibility within the business whose views are respected and understood is massively important.

London Stock Exchange, we had an amazing set of global process owners, very empowered, who were very efficient and effective in making decisions. We came up with an incredibly and surprisingly clean design, although the problem was we realized afterwards that having had such a beautiful design, the delta between where we were and where we were going to was so massive that actually all we'd done was substitute it for a huge change challenge. We did have a brilliant design because those guys were empowered to make the right decisions and beyond their immediate area of responsibility too.

I think the challenge during design is at the time you start talking about design, it's all conceptual. It's up there for the business. They don't quite know what it looks ultimately. You're asking a lot of people to take concepts and really put down and make them sign off in blood sometimes that their to -be process or their design is going to work for them in the future.

That can be really challenging, I think. No matter how many workshops you have, no matter how many screenshots you provide, what I find is when you still go live, there can still always be gaps, challenges. I think that process ownership is key. I think it's how you bring the business into that world and understand.

Some businesses that I've worked in don't have an understanding what process ownership means or looks like and what that accountability looks like for them. Sometimes it's a cultural journey even just getting to that point, I think. What I've found really interesting, because I think I totally agree that process owner role can be, to your point, if it's structured in the right way and it's framed in the right way, it can be very powerful. How do you bring the business a lot?

Because it's ultimately the people putting in the customer data into the CRM system that then ultimately finds its way into an ERP. If it's not done correctly, how do you make the business aware of their behaviours, whether it's CRM, whether it's following a PO process, so they understand the impacts of those behaviours on the success of the ERP? Because for me, that's a lot of some of the challenge. One arguably slightly cranky way in which I've approached this is, I've always had something called a get fit programme, which is before you actually hit the ground running with the design and the build.

You use the months whilst people are busy mobilising and doing business cases and getting all sorts of other things set up to actually do some productive, preparatory work. Some of that is in obvious areas like data cleanse, but I think there's also a process conformance piece. Look at the areas in the business where your processes are not working as intended. Say you're really committed to no PO, no pay, but actually your level of no PO, no pay is terrible.

Really focus on getting that level up now because when they go live, and that will necessarily force you into engagement with the business, because it's them who aren't doing it right. You make clear to them why and what the consequences are of not doing it, and why it's important in the new world that you do do it properly. There's stuff that you can do ahead of the game, I think, to get the business engaged and thinking about how their behaviours and how their non-compliance drives bad practice or complexity.

Obviously now with data mining tools and things like that, the actual evidence of it is a lot more visible, and you can really show people in a very visually engaging way all the screw-ups and complexities that they're generating. I think a couple of other points from that is we're touching or alluding on change management a little bit because I think at the start of the programme you set out what your change management agenda will look like. Referring back to the pain points and the benefits that you're trying to achieve, how do you set out your communications is really key.

How do you develop your change networks, your change champions, and how do you get them from this mobilisation phase, as you talk about, through to what are the expectations for each of the phases? How are they going to work? How are they going to balance BAU? How are they going to then commit days on end or weeks on end to workshops and design outputs and documents that they have to sign off on processes?

It's really, really difficult, but you need to almost coach them through that. That's, for me, one of the key success factors is the change management journey throughout the whole programme. That business readiness group that Gareth referenced is really critical and it should be framed in a way that obviously that business readiness group is receiving instructions from you and you're telling them things that you want them to do and giving them foreseeability in terms of what's to come, but actually it is a forum for them to feed back to you with concerns and issues because they will know things that you don't know and you need to get them into an environment where they feel confident in sharing things and feeding back.

Once you start to act on those issues and items that they raise, even if it's just a sympathetic ear rather than actually doing anything about it, at least that, I think, encourages them to believe that they can be confident in engaging with you and I think that's a big help. Do you think generally the balance is right in terms of external change support versus the internal organisation standing up change? That's a really good question. I've seen I've seen projects in the past where we might get a business integrator or an external company come in and facilitate the change and it's gone really badly because it's a theoretical change.

You know, it's not the hearts and minds that the business need. So I often defer to, actually I'd bring in my own change team who would be then either employed by the business directly or sit under me and they will then live and breathe it throughout. Yes, they can apply all the ad car models or the change models that they want, that's fine, but it's actually, like you say, John, it's about how you sit down with them to listen to them to understand the pain points and move from there through those formal phases of the programme and they develop a trust relationship, they develop a channel or a way in which they can actually communicate back to you with concerns, issues, etc.

It's not an easy role either, is it? Because it's not theoretical and for their role to be effective they've got to understand the design, right? They've got to understand how the business works today, how it's going to work differently post the ERP investment and then what does that mean for people's roles, responsibilities, the kind of race, the racey across the business, what does it mean for the benefits case and how are they supporting it? There has to be a level of knowledge and understanding of the actual design itself and the business model and how it changes as opposed to a very theoretical high level change impact approach.

I think where some transformations go wrong is, and we'll probably come on to this a bit later, is a. not spend enough money on data and b. think that you're going to bring a change manager on towards the end of the project because we're going live on a certain date so only then are we going to need people to help manage the change and I think that's a fundamental flaw in the approach. Often when you're looking at business cases it is expensive so probably the first thing that the execs and the sponsors cut are change managers because they just don't understand it.

I think that is one of the things that you just cannot compromise on. I remember my very first ERP program I went to, I'm not sure I dare mention his name, he's a brilliant finance director, he's been my mentor and someone I've got a lot of time for, but I went to him and plugged in a couple of heads for change management early in the project and he said they're just tree huggers, like why do we need them? The number's gone. Essentially I mean if we were truly provocative I'm sure Carolyn you could have asked a big four representative to sit alongside us and tell why their change management is the best ever.

I've had mixed experiences, I've actually had very good change management from a big four partner at my most recent assignment and they were absolutely brilliant, they brought great technology but I think ultimately you know the reality is that you don't want change done to you by someone else, it has to be organic and within so even if you do decide to take the intellectual capital from a third party and maybe some of their expertise and some of their resource, ultimately you've got to own it because it's going to be around long after they've disappeared from the scene.

What have you learned about leadership in that context because I think change fatigue is a real thing, these programs often spin on for many years in a backdrop of recently Covid and Trump tariffs etc etc. What have you learned, I'm interested from the people side and the leadership side, leading through sort of change fatigue? I'm glad Trump hasn't influenced anything directly that I've done in my career yet. I'm sure even now I'm not on any social media but I did delete my WhatsApp chats before I went to the States last time.

So I think you know change fatigue is a real thing, I mean everyone is constantly in change, the new organization I've joined I'm astonished by how many in-flight projects and activities they're trying to spin out at the same time and I think it does take its toll but I think you know it's a big investment, it justifies serious consideration and serious attention, it's you know potentially genuinely transformational and you know any leader worth their salt in the organization is connected with a program of this type should be fully invested in and you know I think Gareth's reference in passing sponsorship, you know great sponsorship is critical to the success of these programs and I've been lucky I think, not all of my project programs have delivered completely but it's not because the program has been failing, it's because other business circumstances have typically gotten in the way and I've had consistently good sponsorship and it makes such a difference because you do run into barriers, you know one of the organizations I worked for, again I won't mention them by name, but they were massively passive -aggressive in their reaction to the ELP you know and we were exposing a lot of bad accounting practice, the company was very federated so CFOs and divisions could go and moan to their CEO who then escalated up to the CEO and it would come down to the CFO how unhappy they were but you know my sponsor was resolute and determined and focused and fought the battles for me and you know having that kind of focused, attentive and considerate leadership because it's a long journey and sometimes you feel down and dispirited, you know having their resilience alongside you is really helpful.

Yeah and I think you mentioned change fatigue, I mean these programs can be long, multi -year at times and so you're asking a lot of the business, a lot of the program teams and I hate to say it but at the point you go live, it's almost like your foundation's there now, you know you've modernized, you've got a system or a platform, what next? And often everyone sort of slumps back in their seat feeling like they've done it. It's a crash and we've asked a lot of people working nights, weekends, sacrifices, family compromises etc but how do you need to get over that because you know AI is here, it's come, it's already ahead of us as we're talking, there's all these extra things that now as a new system owner you can be doing, as a business you can be harnessing and taking forward with you so change fatigue is real but it can't be a blocker to continuing with improvement.

And can I just pick up very quickly just on the lead, just on that sponsorship, leadership kind of point, if you find yourself, if you're you know you've come into lead a ERP program, you find yourself in a situation where it is quite challenging, political environment, what's your advice I guess, what's your advice to others that are in that position to get to a much more productive kind of sponsorship kind of situation before you launch in, like how have you navigated, like how have you navigated those challenging situations and got to the right outcome?

I mean I suppose ultimately though the reality is that the investments are so big that they have the board behind them right, I mean it's very rarely that you'll you know create an investment that's so boutique that you know there isn't a great deal of attention and focus on it. I think actually it's more problematical when things start to go wrong, you know so the initials, initially you go in full of enthusiasm right and everyone loves you, everyone's behind you, you know you're the most loved creature and they'll say you know you're offering opportunities to people and I think it's when it starts to unravel as sometimes it does that you really work out you know where the proper sponsorship is.

Again you know I've had one project I had had a, we delivered it but it had quite a troubled gestation because we identified huge and very large scale problems with data on the way and Carolyn probably knows which company I'm talking about and you know there was a kind of temporary loss of confidence and loss of faith at that point and you know you could begin to see people going a little bit cold on the notion and starting to wonder, particularly as this particular organisation had two prior failed attempts to get it across the line and that's when I think when you know who your friends are and you have to work extra hard to try and sustain interest and support for what you're doing.

I mean luckily you know it's interesting at the moment particularly in SAP world because there's quite a big burning platform argument as well that kind of drives people's thinking around you know whether or not to pursue an ERP program. It's really interesting to me you know where I was at M&S we did a greenfield deployment we saw it as an opportunity to upgrade and to move forward and do something different. There are a lot of organisations I think out there evaluating ERP in the SAP space, the kind of thing to do minimum necessary just to keep us going and you know so I think it depends on the scale of your ambition but if you've got a really compelling reason to get it across the line which we did at the company I referenced earlier then even in those darker hours there's usually enough board imperative and senior sponsor imperative because their reputation is tied to it right, particularly if it's a CFO sponsoring or indeed a COO or head of GBS or something their own personal reputation is lined up to it so that they can't afford to fail.

Just one final question maybe on sponsorship. They can afford to blame. Yeah one final question on sponsorship from again from a lay person I guess and this has popped up times before and I'm sure it's different in different organisations is the key sponsor or should the key sponsor be the CFO or the CTO? I think part of the sponsorship should be that but I think my belief is that yes they may be the people who are funding it from their BAU pockets or the CAPEX budgets whatever but I think when you're talking about sponsorship it should also be who are the people who are ultimately going to receive the either the data from the system the reports or ultimately going to interface with your suppliers your customers etc.

I think it needs to be a joint effort and I've seen in the past you know yes typically when you're talking finance transformation of course the CFO the FD needs to be there because if a supplier is not going to get paid and there's months of backlogs of invoices that aren't being paid they're the ones who are going to be phoned and called and complained to but if it's not just that you know whether it's other parts of your business involved you absolutely you can't just spring this on them they need to be working with you along the journey.

I mean I firmly believe that big ERP projects and Devgate ERP is not just defined by finance it can extend into operations and manufacturing all sorts of different areas but I'm I don't know whether this is the fashionable view or the unfashionable view I believe the sponsorships should sit with the organisation that's getting the value and technology is an enabler to make that happen I think the days when technology ruled the roost and ran everything is you know kind of out of date and out of character and it's gone and you know they have a very important role I think in shaping the selection and choosing the right product and managing the architecture and defining the evolving technology roadmap but really you know they are just enabling value generation in a functional area and therefore I think the CTO should sit back and not be the sponsor unless it's like a super technical upgrade and there's hardly any business engagement in which case it's probably fine.

Oh and in what situations do you feel that tech upgrade is warranted versus because I think I find it interesting that the kind of move towards a technical upgrade versus doing a proper business transformation appreciate there's a cost there's a cost difference to those approaches but what's your view on is there ever a real reason just to do a tech upgrade? If I simply tell you which is what they are telling us then probably yes. I mean it probably comes back to the start of the conversation you know what is the reason for this have you been told look you're going to be no longer supported on your platform then there's obviously one reason but I think baking that into some of the other reasons you know might be a compliance or regulatory requirement there might be some control failures in your audit environments or elsewhere there might be new business units or integrations or mergers that might be taking place some some of those reasons are apparent you know it's not just that your your system has been perfect and SAP comes along and says oh by the way you need to change that's that's not the driving factor it should be the other way around it should be okay what is it that we're not achieving this year or the next couple of years that we really need to do and use that as the platform for growth.

And I think I'm seeing a little bit in the SAP space that some companies are reluctant to go beyond a technical upgrade or a brownfield upgrade to S4 because they're worried about the consequential impact their architecture is so tangled and complex you know with Gareth and I both worked for Penguin or been associated with Penguin books for a while I joined Penguin I'd shame to say probably 30 years ago plus and they had a product called Vista that was on the cusp of retirement and it lasted at least 20 years.

Yeah so when we did the merger Penguin and Random House Vista was still there. So people are terrified of those you know those old connections those old integrations and the consequences and the destabilization that may come so sometimes I think people just choose the path to least resistance you just move forward.