
The definitive guide to ERP selection: key steps & criteria
March 7, 2025
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by Valery Panteleev,
ERP Solutions Consultant
With 10+ years of experience delivering tailored ERP solutions across industries, Itransition’s ERP consultants help businesses make a sound ERP choice and ensure successful platform adoption.
Table of contents
A seven-step ERP selection guide
The ERP market has evolved, offering thousands of software options and vendors. Since ERP systems are long-term investments, selecting the right one is a critical decision. To help you choose an ERP solution that delivers maximum value to your organization, we’ve compiled this guide that walks you through each step of the selection process.
ERP selection is all about negotiations. If you want it to be successful, you should know what you need precisely, clearly understand the offered capabilities, and imagine what you can eventually get.

Konstantin Pilkevich
Solution Consultant, Head of Itransition's ERP Center of Excellence
An ERP selection team is a group of employees (department managers, team leads, subject matter experts, shareholders, and partners) from different departments, business units, and locations. Their goal is to assist the ERP project team with software requirements definition and attend ERP software vendor demos. Experts should be selected based on their competence, not job titles, and should not be afraid to speak up and voice unpopular opinions. The team should also include employees who have in-depth knowledge of your current processes and will use the ERP system daily.
If there is no relevant expertise in your company, you can consider hiring a professional consultant to help with ERP selection.
Note: If time allows, your company can encourage a wider discussion among employees and stakeholders. Another option is to delegate this decision to a smaller group of stakeholders who can drive consensus within limited timeframes and champion change.
Step 2. Create a plan
ERP selection can take from several weeks to several months, and a plan helps keep the process efficient and on track. During this step, a company has to decide on:
- Overall ERP solution scope, or what business function and workflows should ERP cover
- Key integrations with existing systems
- Major constraints to ERP selection and deployment, including budget, timelines, and IT expertise
- Evaluation criteria for assessing the solution
- Selection timeline and deadline
Step 3. Determine ERP requirements
This step focuses on getting to know end-users, their needs, objectives, expectations, common workarounds, and unique ways to handle their business processes. Based on these findings, companies can outline the overall project vision and goals. During requirements gathering, prioritize understanding what is needed and why, without delving into how it will be implemented. Such an approach ensures that software requirements are not solely driven by end-users’ existing way of performing tasks. You need to conduct interviews, workshops, and Q&A sections and review existing policies and practices to learn:
- Business process inefficiencies and pain points
- Workflow breakdowns and bottlenecks
- Goals for ERP implementation
- Minimal ERP requirements
- The vision of ERP success
- Fears and risks connected with ERP implementation
Note: ERP is not a technology, but a business project. Without a clear understanding of end-users’ needs, you risk making decisions based on a platform's technical capabilities solely, which would lead to failure.
Step 4. Document ERP requirements
Aggregate and formalize requirements into a software requirements document. All elicited requirements can be split into groups by priority, for example ‘must-have’, ‘not mandatory, but beneficial’, and ‘nice to have’. Once prioritized, all involved stakeholders should review, discuss, and approve the finalized feature list.
Step 5. Shortlist ERP vendors
Move on to compile a vendor selection list with viable candidates. After assessing ERP vendors against the shortlisted criteria yourself or with the help of experts, you can issue requests for information (RFIs). RFIs should contain your organization’s most important ERP requirements, short- and long-term goals, and a request for high-level pricing information. After receiving vendor responses, you can end up with two or three you’d like to pursue further.
Note: Don’t necessarily aim for tier 1 ERP – not all organizations need such comprehensive business systems. Besides, some advanced tier 2 and tier 3 applications have similarly rich feature sets.
Step 6. Schedule demos & Q&A sessions
Send the selected ERP vendors requests for proposals (RFPs) and personalized demo scripts. Such tailored demos will let your ERP selection team properly evaluate the software's ability to address your business requirements and make a difference for your company’s daily operations.
After the demos, the selection team should discuss them, give them scores, and decide on a second demo if necessary. It’s advisable to also hold Q&A sessions with the vendors - it builds trust and an open culture and helps avoid ambiguity.Â
Note: Don’t settle for standard sales demos, ask for a personalized presentation.
Step 7. Sign the contract
Now it’s time to evaluate proposals, which cover implementation costs and recurring payments, timeframes and the scope of work, implementation approach and support level. Once the board has made a decision, you are ready to negotiate. Usually, vendor negotiations last several weeks or up to a month, during which you can get a discount depending on the number of licenses you’re purchasing and the agreement term.
The final stage of the ERP software selection process is signing a contract, which covers the provided software and services, costs, mutual obligations, timeline, roles, and responsibilities.
Need help with choosing the right ERP system for your project?
ERP software selection criteria
Each company must define its own specific ERP selection criteria based on its unique needs and workflows. However, there are core criteria for choosing ERP software applicable to all companies regardless of their size, industry, geography, user count, or technology landscape.
Product capabilities
Recommendations
To find an enterprise resource planning platform with the most suitable feature set, you have to draw up a clear and comprehensive list of functional requirements defining the future solution’s modules, such as customer relationship management (CRM), project management, procurement, supply chain management, marketing and sales, ecommerce, inventory management, etc. You can gather them across the organization, narrow them down to the most crucial ones, and approve them with key stakeholders. This document can be further used as a checklist for ERP platform evaluation.
Considerations
- Why do you need an ERP solution?
- What business workflows and time-consuming tasks should be/can be automated?
- What is wrong with your current system, if anything?
- What areas of the business or functional areas lack visibility/reliable reporting?
Flexibility & extensibility
Recommendations
Even if you find a perfectly fitting solution feature-wise, chances are you will still need to customize an ERP platform when your business grows more complex. Therefore, you need to ensure the ERP platform allows for extension and customization with no adverse effects on other ERP components.
Considerations
- Can new software features/modules be added?
- How well does an ERP platform support your business plans?
- Does an ERP platform allow for extended customization?
- What support for ERP customization is provided?
- How much does ERP customization cost?
Performance & availability
Recommendations
For the effectiveness and usability of the solution, you have to ensure the platform's uptime and performance are well-aligned with your business specifics. For real-time business-critical workloads, some ERP vendors guarantee up to 99.9% uptime, which means a company faces up to no more than 8.76 hours of downtime a year.
Considerations
- Can an ERP platform meet your technical needs?
- How many users will use the ERP platform?
- How many users will use the platform daily?
- What are the most common ERP workloads?
Scalability
Recommendations
The ideas for future ERP enhancements usually come long after the initial ERP implementation. So when selecting an ERP platform, consider your future needs, the growing complexity of business workflows, and whether the solution can fully cater to them. Also, pay attention to ERP’s pricing model to understand the cost of adding new users or implementing it across multiple sites. For example, on-premises solutions may need additional servers to scale.
Considerations
- Will we need to add users in the future?
- Can an ERP platform accommodate more employees, departments, and types of users?
- Does our organization have the potential to expand into new markets or go global?
Security
Recommendations
Make sure the ERP platform supports the required security level and satisfies all regulatory and compliance requirements. Opt for ERP systems with comprehensive security mechanisms, including role-based data access control, multi-factor authentication options, consistent approach to patching and vulnerability management, data encryption capabilities, dynamic data masking, and more.
Considerations
- Are security upgrades included in licensing?
- What level of flexibility do you need for access control management?
- Does the platform offer built-in functionality to support your industry-specific requirements?
Integration capabilities
Recommendations
Since an ERP system needs to access and use data from other corporate applications and systems as well as third-party tools you use, look for software with rich system integration capabilities, such as standard communication protocols, open and easy-to-use APIs, and pre-built connectors.
Considerations
- How does an ERP system support integrations with our business applications, including legacy systems?
- How will data migration be performed? Is real-time data synchronization enabled?
- What out-of-the-box integration tools does the ERP platform have?
- Does an ERP system support EDI?
- How is data consistency enabled across systems?
Industry expertise
Recommendations
In-depth industry expertise defines how well the ERP platform caters to the business specifics of the company. It may not be necessarily an industry-specific ERP solution, but should still offer customized extensions and ensure compliance with common industry regulations.Â
It’s a good tactic to choose a platform that was successfully implemented by companies from your field, especially companies of comparable size and with similar requirements and corporate culture.Â
Considerations
- Does the nature of your business require a specialized industry platform?
- How long has the vendor been working in your industry and have they been successful in it?
- Does the ERP system cater to my business market segment?
- Are there many successful implementation cases?
- Can the vendor provide customer references?
Deployment model
Recommendations
When choosing an ERP vendor, you have to decide whether you deploy the solution on your own IT infrastructure or in the cloud, where the implementation and maintenance is performed by the provider.
When considering deployment options, factor in IT support and staff skill sets, your geolocation, and government regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Some ERP vendors offer both deployment options or a hybrid approach, while most offer only one model. If you choose the former, make sure the vendor doesn’t plan to discontinue the selected option in the near future.
Considerations
- How much will an on-premises and a cloud-based ERP system cost?
- Does a vendor offer cloud migration support?
- What are the egress charges?
User experience
Recommendations
Ensure that the ERP platform caters to end-users’ needs and is easy to use. Therefore, factor in usability and ease of navigation, the learning curve, and a typical adoption rate. An additional advantage will be free access to training videos and product documentation, an online knowledgebase or user community, and a call center.Â
Considerations
- Have employees used an ERP system before?
- Are your end-users tech-savvy?
- What training will be most effective for end users?
- Are ongoing support and training for end-users included in the licensing fees?
- Is user experience consistent across departments/devices?
- Are there an intuitive user interface and self-service capabilities for non-tech users?
Support & maintenance
Recommendations
ERP software requires solid tech support for ongoing daily operations and issue resolution. Thus, when choosing a new ERP system, determine the type of support and maintenance approach offered, SLA types, how version compatibility is maintained, and who the vendor’s implementation partners are.
Considerations
- What minimal functional support is available? Is it included in the pricing?
- Is infrastructure monitoring available? How often are reports on the system’s performance issued?
- What support escalation options are available?
- What is the guaranteed response time for each type of support?
Product roadmap & innovation
Recommendations
To make sure the ERP platform will be supported over the contract’s duration and the vendor will continue investing in it, weigh in how long the product has been on the market, its global presence, customer base, ongoing R&D investments, and so on. Prioritize ERP systems that have recently been updated. And vice versa, if a product has not been recently updated, the vendor may be planning to discontinue it. Because advanced technologies can improve many ERP operations, look for systems that offer such capabilities as Internet of Things (IoT) integration, mobile access, BI, workflow automation, and ML and AI incorporation.
Considerations
- What is the vendor’s product roadmap? What new features/versions/updates are planned?
- Does the vendor publish updates on a prescribed schedule?
- How frequently are updates and patches planned?
- Is there an additional charge for a new feature upgrade?
- Does the ERP system support AI/machine learning, IoT, blockchain, and other advanced tech?
Total cost of ownership
Recommendations
There are a couple of cost factors to take into account, including initial purchase of software and hardware, license fees, implementation and setup costs, software support and maintenance costs, and end-user expenses.
Firstly, you have to decide on the deployment model. With on-premises ERP solutions, you take on the heavy lifting of all upfront hardware and software acquisition costs, configuration and customization, employee training, ongoing administration, upgrades, and security.
Cloud-based ERP solutions are usually provided as a service (SaaS), thus you pay a subscription fee that is defined by the functional scope, number of users, infrastructure resources consumed, and support level. No doubt, the absence of heavy upfront investments makes SaaS ERPs appealing, however, in the long run, this model may prove more expensive.
Don’t eliminate ERP vendors too early on because of the price tag. TCO comes into the picture only after you know what system’s functionality, integrations, customization, and support level you need as well as your recurring software costs and costs for a three- and five-year period.
Considerations
- Does the software licensing model align well with our business needs?
- Does the pricing include security, maintenance, and updates?
- How soon will we see return on investments (ROI)?
- What is the cost of the transition from legacy platforms?
Vendor viability
Recommendations
To evaluate vendor credibility, trustworthiness, and risks related to the long-term partnership, consider company credibility (its age, financial health, development methodology), active customer base, case studies, and pricing policy transparency.
Considerations
- How long has the ERP vendor been on the market?
- Does the ERP vendor have a clear development approach?
- Who are the vendor’s clientele?
- Are the vendor’s pricing and development policies predictable?
ERP software selection challenges
Challenge
Solution
All platforms promise to satisfy your business needs. How to choose the right one?
Some of your decision-makers have already worked with a particular ERP. Do you need to use the same?
Not all employees are excited about ERP and can resist using it after the implementation.
ERP selection checklist
This checklist highlights the critical capabilities to look for in an optimal ERP software solution.

- Out-of-the-box functionality covers 80% or more of the solution scopeÂ
- Industry-specific functionality out of the box or as an add-on extensionÂ
- Deployment flexibility
- Transparent pricing
- Rich customization and integration capabilities (open APIs and pre-built connectors)
- Highly scalable
- Easy to use and intuitive
- Regular upgrades and updates
- Provided supportÂ
- Self-service capabilities
- Built-in business intelligence capabilitiesÂ
- Mobile-ready
- Сompatible with emerging trends and technology (AI, ML, RPA, IoT)
Make a sound ERP technology choice with Itransition
ERP selection FAQs
Why is an ERP selection process so important?
Without a structured approach to ERP selection, a company can choose based on other companies' reviews or advertising. If their technology choice turns out wrong, they can end up overspending, in need of heavy customizations, or facing user resistance.
What are the most common mistakes during ERP selection?
Among the most common mistakes companies make are predetermined bias, not paying enough attention to user requirements, and preferring certain vendors or products because of the hype.
What to look for when choosing an ERP consultant?
Factor in the following aspects:
- An ERP consultant must be vendor-agnostic
- ERP consultants should have a structured and proven ERP selection process
- Professional ERP consultants have to provide guidance throughout the entire ERP implementation process and know how to address typical ERP implementation challenges
- An ERP consultant should see the big picture, have industry experience, understand your business and its strategy, and be able to tailor ERP to your business strategy

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