8 problems you'll face if you decide to implement an ERP system

Using an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system is another tool that helps make business management more efficient.

But every system can give rise to common problems, such as bugs during use, or things you used to be able to do that you can no longer do the old way once the system is in place.

This article describes the problems you’ll face when a company first starts using an ERP. Here they are.

1. High cost

We have to say plainly that ERP systems are expensive — installation, implementation, and an annual service fee too. Any vendor that doesn’t charge these would have to be a charity, because implementing an ERP requires specialised experts, plus programmers who can write the system to meet users’ needs, which makes the system expensive.

You also have to pay the annual service fee, and if you don’t pay this part, your organisation may not be able to keep using the system — becoming a major, chronic problem for organisations that are not financially prepared.

2. Employees adapting to the ERP

This is the most important issue in implementing an ERP, because every operator wants their organisation to advance and to be able to operate without depending on any single person. Employees have to adapt so they can use the ERP. Inevitably, the problem everyone faces is resistance from employees — especially the group accustomed to the old ways of working.

3. The problem when new employees join

An ERP is more complex and more cumbersome than a typical system. If the organisation hasn’t prepared a super user — that is, someone who can teach the way of working to new people — then when a new person joins and an old one resigns, training must be arranged again for the new person. That training costs money, often in the tens of thousands of baht per day.

4. Connecting ERP data to other systems

If a company has fairly varied systems and wants to connect the ERP with others, such as a point-of-sale system or a production-planning system, it can cause instability in use or bugs originating from a system. So you should choose an ERP with a complete, end-to-end set of modules. Even if you have to change the system across the whole organisation, you should — because it makes work smoother than connecting systems together.

5. Data loss

This problem occurs very rarely, but it’s not unheard of: if your organisation has no IT to back up data and guard against being hacked by bad actors who get in and delete all the data on the server, there’s a risk of a data leak. That’s why many organisations today choose cloud services to store their working data — and we should say here that the cloud is more secure and more stable than running and storing data on your own server.

6. Technical problems

There may be technical problems, such as bugs or software defects that need fixing quickly. But in most cases, when the system hits a technical bug, it is fixed urgently.

7. Data security problems

Using an ERP can expose important data to unauthorised access if security is inadequate — for example, the vendor accessing the database. There should be support conditions specifying what level of database access is permitted.

8. Dependence on the vendor

This is an area where the ERP vendor and the user can clash, because users often think the ERP support team must handle everything — such as accessing the database, or getting into internal data to fix mis-keyed entries. The worst case is reporting nothing but expecting support to fix it anyway.

In reality, the ERP vendor cannot access the user’s database except with an authorisation document signed by a director or authorised person, so they can’t know what the user’s problem is. Most of the time they use remote access to fix it on screen instead. So users should not depend too much on the vendor, because support that exceeds the scope of the agreed conditions can incur costs for the organisation.

The problems that most commonly arise from using an ERP are: high cost, employees adapting to the ERP, the problem when new employees join, connecting ERP data to other systems, data loss, technical problems, data security problems, and over-dependence on the vendor.

Therefore, operators should be involved in the whole implementation in order to understand it and to guard against the risk of all the problems described above.