Good ERP requirements describe business outcomes, process rules, data, controls, scale, integrations, and acceptance evidence. A long feature wish list encourages vendors to answer “yes” while hiding configuration, customisation, operational, and adoption costs.
Start with Outcomes and Scope
State the business problem, target outcomes, entities, countries, sites, users, transaction volumes, languages, currencies, and implementation boundaries. Name what will not be replaced.
Baseline current performance—close duration, inventory accuracy, order cycle time, manual reconciliations, or error rate—so success can later be measured.
Map End-to-End Processes
Document priority journeys such as lead-to-cash, procure-to-pay, plan-to-produce, record-to-report, and hire-to-retire. Include triggers, roles, decisions, exceptions, approvals, handoffs, controls, and outputs.
Separate true competitive differentiation and regulatory necessity from habits inherited from the current system.
Write Testable Requirements
Use a consistent structure: role, trigger, required behaviour, business rule, performance or control, and evidence. For example: “A finance controller can trace every journal adjustment to requester, approver, timestamp, before/after values, and source transaction.”
Label each requirement mandatory, high-value, or optional. Give vendors realistic scenarios and sample data to demonstrate rather than permitting slide-only responses.
Cover Data and Integration
Define master-data ownership, identifiers, quality rules, history, migration years, reconciliation, archiving, and retention. List every interface with direction, frequency, volume, latency, protocol, failure handling, and system of record.
Do not write “integrates with CRM.” Specify customers, orders, credit status, conflicts, retry, monitoring, and acceptance.
Include Non-Functional Needs
Set availability, recovery, peak performance, security, privacy, audit, segregation of duties, localisation, accessibility, support, upgrade, and environment requirements. Ask how each is provided: standard configuration, extension, custom code, third party, roadmap, or unavailable.
Evaluate Total Fit
Score functional fit alongside implementation effort, architecture, data migration, vendor capability, partner quality, user experience, reporting, extensibility, operating cost, contract, and exit.
Require vendors to record assumptions and gaps. A transparent “no” is safer than an unqualified “yes.”
Make Requirements a Delivery Asset
Trace approved requirements to process design, configuration, data, test cases, training, controls, and acceptance. Control changes through a decision log with cost and timeline impact.
DualByte's ERP solutions service can facilitate requirements discovery and build an evidence-based selection package.
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