Start here
Most people arrive at an ERP decision holding one of two things: a question, or an industry. Both are valid entry points into these guides, and they lead to the same place from different directions.
If you are early, or the search has not yet narrowed to a shortlist, start with the management framework. It covers what problem you are actually solving, who needs to own the decision, how to turn the way the business works into requirements, and what has to be approved before anything is signed. Every other guide assumes that groundwork.
The seven decision guides
These follow one decision from beginning to end. They are numbered because the sequence matters: each answers a question that becomes hard to answer well if the previous one was skipped. You do not have to read them in order, but it helps to know where you are standing.
- 01 How to Choose the Right ERP What problem are we actually solving, and who has to agree? Requirements, stakeholder ownership, shortlisting, and what each function must approve before the final decision.
- 02 Industry-Specific ERP vs Generic ERP: How to Decide Does our industry actually need specialist depth, or will a broader platform do? Which operating workflows genuinely require specialist depth, which can be handled through broader ERP capability or connected systems, and which deserve the hardest demonstration.
- 03 Cloud ERP vs On-Premise ERP: A Decision Framework Who carries the infrastructure, and what are we agreeing to run ourselves? Responsibility, infrastructure, control, connectivity, security and lifecycle — decided separately from whether the product fits.
- 04 ERP Pricing, Licensing & 3–5 Year TCO: How to Compare Quotes Are these quotations even comparable? Turning differently-shaped vendor proposals into one economic comparison across licensing, implementation, infrastructure, support and lifecycle.
- 05 ERP Implementation, Data Migration & Go-Live What does the organisation have to do once the vendor is chosen? What sits behind the implementation line: migration, testing, cutover, and the work that stays with the business rather than the vendor.
- 06 ERP Demo & Vendor Evaluation Checklist: What to Ask Vendors to Show How do we make a demonstration prove something? Building scenarios from trigger to business result, scoring evidence rather than impressions, checking references against specific claims, and recognising red flags.
- 07 ERP Integrations, Data Portability & Post-Go-Live Support What will we be living with in year three? APIs, integration ownership, what happens when an interface fails, how data leaves if it has to, and the support model that outlasts the project.
Choose your industry
Each industry guide takes the principles above into the workflows and exceptions of one sector: what the operating chain actually looks like, which requirements deserve a hard demonstration, and where a generic answer usually stops being adequate. Each also routes back to whichever of the seven decision guides you still need.
How the guides work together
Three of the seven do a structural job for the rest. The other four each own one decision outright, and are written so you can go straight to the one you are stuck on.
- 01 Master decision entry How to Choose the Right ERP holds the framework everything else assumes: the problem, the people, the requirements and the sign-off.
- 02 Industry routing Industry-Specific vs Generic is the bridge between the general decision and your sector. It is where you work out how much specialist depth your operation genuinely needs.
- 03 Deployment Cloud vs On-Premise owns infrastructure and responsibility, kept separate from product fit so the two are not confused.
- 04 Commercial Pricing, Licensing & TCO owns the economics: making unlike quotations comparable across three to five years.
- 05 Implementation Implementation, Migration & Go-Live owns what the organisation itself has to do after selection.
- 06 Evidence layer Demo & Vendor Evaluation is where claims get tested. Every other guide eventually hands you something to make a vendor demonstrate.
- 07 Integration and support Integrations, Data Portability & Support owns the arrangement you live with once the project team has gone.
The eight industry guides sit underneath all seven. Each one assumes the framework rather than repeating it, and links back to whichever decision guide the question really belongs to.
Evidence-led evaluation
A demonstration is not a product tour. The most useful thing a buyer can do is stop asking whether a system can do something and start asking a vendor to show it happening, with realistic data, from the trigger through to the business result — including the exception, not only the normal flow.
That is what the SHOW ME sections in every guide are for. Each one names a scenario specific enough that a vendor either demonstrates it or cannot, and vague answers become visible immediately. Where a guide can point at an Exactlly customer whose operation is publicly documented, it does; where no proof has been approved for publication, it says nothing rather than implying something.
Before you replace at all
Every guide above assumes a decision to evaluate a new system has already been taken. That assumption is worth testing first. A platform is sometimes blamed for a process that was never defined, a data problem that predates it, or a reporting gap that a different piece of work would close faster and for less money.
The selection and evaluation guide covers that earlier question, along with how large-enterprise and mid-market systems differ in ways that matter before a shortlist is drawn.
Evaluating exactllyERP?
If Exactlly is on your shortlist, the most useful demonstration is the one built from your own operating scenarios rather than a standard tour. Bring the workflows the guides told you to test.
Request an exactllyERP demonstration