- Ted Rogers
- Reading Time: 6 minutes
Most ERP programs don’t fail outright. They erode slowly and midstream as costs rise, scope drifts, and value slips out of focus. Leaders feel the pressure to stay the course, but doing so without course correction can be more damaging than delay.
This blog explores the critical juncture where transformation efforts often go sideways and what decisive, commercially grounded action looks like. From bloated delivery and unchecked change orders to under-enforced vendor accountability, we break down how to regain control before trust, budget, and outcomes are lost for good.
Why ERP Programs Falter Midstream
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) programs rarely go off the rails because their underlying technology fails. Instead, they tend to falter midstream because the total cost of realizing value becomes unjustifiable.
CIOs and other executive leaders find themselves navigating a pivotal inflection point: costs are rising, timelines are slipping, and confidence is wavering. Yet, the expectation remains to deliver against the original transformation vision.
At this critical juncture, many organizations react with what appear to be quick fixes like freezing spend, deferring modules, or delaying activities. But these actions, while seemingly decisive, often introduce more long-term risk than they mitigate. They delay value realization, obscure the root causes of financial drift, and compound delivery complexity down the line.
What sets high-performing CIOs and C-suite sponsors apart is their ability to recalibrate intelligently rather than retreat impulsively. Strategic cost optimization doesn’t begin with slashing budgets; it begins with confronting misalignment between spend and value.
It requires the courage to ask hard questions:
- Where has the investment drifted away from measurable business benefit?
- Which workstreams continue to command budget despite lacking sponsorship, alignment, or outcome clarity?
That’s why midstream isn’t the time to pause. It’s the time to pressure-test. Rather than react impulsively, leading organizations take a hard look at how effort, spend, and outcomes align.
Cut Without Collapse: Midstream ERP Cost Optimization Without Compromising Outcomes
It is not uncommon for ERP programs to become bloated with delivery effort tied to legacy duplication, orphaned functionality, or outdated assumptions. These are not scope problems. Instead they are signals of commercial and strategic drift. In a modern ERP context, every active investment should have a clear and measurable link to business outcomes.
This becomes even more critical as vendors introduce AI-powered delivery accelerators or automation tools mid-program. If your System Integrator (SI) touts the use of generative AI or robotic process automation to increase delivery velocity, but your burn rate remains unchanged (or worse, increases), then the innovation isn’t being used to drive client value. It’s being used to expand vendor margins.
AI Should Accelerate Value, Not Vendor Margins
Vendors are increasingly introducing generative AI and automation tools mid-program under the promise of acceleration. But without commercial safeguards, these tools often benefit the System Integrator more than the client. AI-driven automation should reduce delivery effort, compress timelines, or improve data readiness. Ideally, it’s doing all three. If it doesn’t, you’re not looking at innovation. You’re looking at margin optimization.
It’s critical that AI initiatives are tied to contractual outcomes and tracked for measurable impact. Otherwise, they become the new justification for scope padding, vague uplift fees, and rebranded change orders. True AI value doesn’t come from more activity; it comes from smarter delivery, and that requires governance teams to be as technically aware as they are commercially savvy.
CIOs, Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs), and transformation leaders must demand evidence that new delivery strategies, especially AI-enabled ones, are translating into improved efficiency and enhanced value capture. Without clear ROI validation, these initiatives become cost multipliers, not cost savers.
It’s not about dismantling programs. It’s about revalidating each component against its alignment to the original business case, not the vendor’s internal timeline or the PMO’s comfort zone. Every module, milestone, and resource must be pressure-tested against current needs and market conditions.
The true cost of waiting is not measured in dollars. It’s measured in missed outcomes, eroded trust, and transformation fatigue. Strategic course correction is not failure. It’s leadership. And in today’s market, where vendors are leveraging AI for their own benefit and budgets are under more scrutiny than ever, delaying action is not a cautious move. It’s a costly one.
But misalignment doesn’t just show up in bloated delivery. It often hides in plain sight, buried inside change orders that quietly reshape scope and inflate costs.
The Change Order Trap: Stop Paying for What You Already Funded
In today’s ERP programs, change orders (COs) aren’t just one-off events. Instead, they’re often part of a secondary pricing strategy, executed subtly but systematically. What was once the exception has quietly become routine. And when change orders are normalized without scrutiny, they quietly drain budgets, dilute business cases, and undermine executive trust in the transformation.
By the time a CO reaches the CIO, CTO, or CPO’s desk, it’s often wrapped in urgency and justified with technical rationale. But strip away the layers and you’ll frequently find something troubling: scope that was already paid for, now being repackaged and resold. Or you may find incremental requests framed as essential, when they merely represent over-engineered delivery logic. Even worse, you could find filler work to keep partner benches busy.
The issue isn’t that all change orders are invalid. Some truly reflect evolving business needs. The real concern is that most COs aren’t rigorously tested against what’s already been contractually funded. In environments lacking commercial rigor, SIs quickly learn that they can push COs with minimal resistance. Over time, that lack of resistance becomes the standard operating model.
The erosion doesn’t happen all at once. It’s death by a thousand hours:
- A minor tweak to a report template.
- A “necessary” adjustment to a test plan.
- A vague claim that a spec needs “expansion.”
None of these seem worth escalating individually. But their collective impact is staggering, including inflated burn rates, diluted ROI, and confusion over what’s actually been delivered versus what’s simply been charged. Suddenly, escalating these items becomes a need rather than a want in attempt to keep your program on track.
Even worse, some vendors capitalize on approval fatigue. They know the executive team doesn’t want to appear as a bottleneck, so they frame COs as procedural steps. The approval process becomes a rubber stamp. But if your team can’t articulate what’s changed since the original contract, or why the effort wasn’t scoped originally, your program isn’t in control. It’s reacting.
Change orders are only one way value erodes mid-program. Another is through unchecked delivery drift where vendors appear productive but fall short on meaningful progress.
Your SI Isn’t Overdelivering. You Might Just Be Under-Enforcing.
It’s a familiar scene in many ERP programs: weekly governance meetings are packed, status decks are polished, and activity appears high. But despite all this motion, something feels off. Value isn’t materializing. Timelines are blurring. Costs keep climbing. And yet, your SI insists everything is “on track.”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: motion can mimic progress, but your SI may be optimizing for delivery velocity rather than business outcomes.
SIs are, by nature, for-profit entities. Their incentives are not inherently misaligned with yours, but their optimization models often are. They’re focused on resource utilization, contract fulfillment, and revenue velocity. That’s not villainous; if anything, it’s expected. The challenge arises when clients fail to enforce outcome accountability and contract alignment midstream.
CIOs, Chief Transformation Officers, and other executive sponsors need to move beyond surface-level tracking. Resource counts, sprint completions, and hours burned are not proxies for progress. What matters is how well those inputs translate into business capability, user readiness, and go-live confidence.
Delivery plans that once felt sound at program kickoff often degrade over time. The senior architect who was promised may have been reassigned. A skilled nearshore team may have been swapped out for a lower-cost offshore one. Interpretation of “delivered” scope may shift quietly. If no one is watching and enforcing these deviations, they become permanent and costly.
Often times, the SI wants to transition to the next phase of the program despite these erosions to the original plan. If you are uncertain whether the vendor has met the SIs obligations of the current milestone, it is your responsibility to pump the brakes and ensure those obligations are being met before moving on.
This isn’t negligence on the vendor’s part. It’s optimization. The real question is: are you positioned to defend your interests as strongly as your SI is defending theirs?
How UpperEdge Can Help
At UpperEdge, we help clients regain control of their ERP programs by installing what’s often missing: real-time enforcement grounded in commercial awareness and contractual leverage. We don’t operate in hindsight. Our advisors bring live, vendor-specific insight that enables your team to challenge assumptions, realign delivery, and protect business value before it erodes.
We identify where delivery has drifted from contractual commitments, whether through staffing changes, pacing misalignment, or vague justifications for added cost. Then we guide you in course-correcting with evidence, not escalation. Our clients have recaptured millions mid-program by shifting the conversation from vendor-led activity to business-led outcomes.
This is more than oversight. It is enforceable accountability. We equip internal teams with the tools, data, and commercial leverage to push back on scope overreach, unjustified change orders, and hidden inefficiencies. Whether it’s halting a $1.2 million approval tied to pre-priced deliverables or restoring a diluted staffing model, we ensure your investment stays aligned with original intent.
If your current governance process surfaces issues but lacks the power to act, or if your team is not empowered to ask the tough questions, UpperEdge brings the structure, clarity, and confidence needed to make every dollar traceable and every decision defensible. Explore our Project Execution Advisory Services to learn how we can help.
