The ABCs of ERP & Beyond

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There's one piece of ERP work you keep putting off. You trust your partner, you like them, they answer the phone. But this particular job needs experience they don't have. This week Pete, Nirav and Emily are joined by Ken Sebahar, who has been implementing Navision since 2001, used to co-host A Shot of Business Central and a Beer, and has just written a white paper, The Multi-Partner Advantage. The question is whether you can bring in a specialist without blowing up the relationship that already works.

In this episode:

• "Who asked you to change partners?" Adding a specialist doesn't mean leaving your partner
• What a partner strategy is, and why you need one even with a single partner
• The EDI test: is it the best solution, or the one your partner knows?
• How to tell your current partner without making them feel fired
• Who you call when it breaks: primary support partner, partner team, clear lines
• AppSource, curated app lists and owning your own system
• When one partner is plenty

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP) · Emily Browning
Guest: Ken Sebahar, independent Business Central consultant and advisor, Speaking Business Central (speakingbusinesscentral.com)

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At some point in every ERP project, someone says "we'll pick that up in phase two" — and the room nods, because it's the sentence that lets everyone stop arguing. Then you go live, orders go out, invoices go out, and that list quietly becomes something nobody talks about. This week Pete, Nirav and Emily try to work out what phase two actually is, why it so rarely happens, and whether it should be called phase two at all.

In this episode:

• What actually lands in phase two — and what you get free just by being on a modern ERP
• Why phase one never finishes when the MVP gets lost
• Six reasons phase two dies: no date, no team, no appetite, and the people who leave
• Book the audit, re-map the process, and let the business — not IT — drive it
• What can't wait: cloud tax, native financials, barcoding, AP automation, and anything that touches transactions
• Already on WMS or EDI? That's phase one, not phase two
• No automation until the team can fly manually

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP) · Emily Browning

No sponsors, no adverts. We were going to sort that out in phase two.

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The demos are done, the contract's signed, and a calendar invite has landed that just says "discovery". This week Pete, Nirav and Emily take on the first real phase of an ERP implementation — the week where the business has to explain how it actually operates, and where projects are quietly won or lost.

Emily opens with the definition worth pinning to the wall: discovery week is the kickoff, and its entire purpose is that the requirements get laid out now. Her test for a good one is blunt — if a pile of new requirements turns up mid-project, the discovery wasn't done properly. Nirav draws the line most businesses miss: the discovery you got during the sales cycle was a "do we have a deal?" exercise, not the real thing. The real thing starts after signature, and the last 10% it surfaces is what makes or breaks the project.

From there it gets practical. Why sessions run by department, so the order entry team can complain about finance in peace (and vice versa). Pete's four buckets for every gap that comes up — configuration, customisation, training, or a business process change — and Nirav on what genuinely forces the customisation route: compliance, third-party integrations, and people who simply won't change. Emily's rule might be the most valuable thing in the episode: the vendor does not discuss customisations with her users. Process, yes. Solutions go to her and the project team — because "yeah, the system can do that" without "...and that's a customisation" is how budgets die.

Then the week itself. What to send the partner before Monday (invoices, SOPs, the sales report that runs every Monday morning). Why a blank whiteboard on day one means you've already failed. Why warehouse discovery happens on the warehouse floor, where the partner can point at a pile of paper and ask "what's that?" — and learn that someone scans every page to accounts at the end of each shift. The whiz kid you need in the room, the grounded voice who can answer "when did that last actually happen?", and why you never give the know-it-all the pen.

And the Friday test. Nirav wants pilot scripts — hundreds of documented business scenarios, 80–90% complete, that become the training plan, the testing plan and the partner's liability shield. Pete wants a re-edited project plan and a message for the users so they don't hear silence until UAT. Emily wants you to take the vendor to dinner, because for the price of a few cocktails it's the cheapest consultancy you'll ever buy.

In this episode:

• Sales discovery vs functional discovery — and why confusing them costs you the project
• Who should be in the room (more people than you think), and who never gets the pen
• The four buckets: configuration, customisation, training, or process change
• Emily's rule: the vendor never talks customisations with your users
• Walking the floor: partial-shipment spreadsheets, paper piles, and everything a conference room won't surface
• What must exist by Friday: pilot scripts, a re-edited plan, and a message for your users

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP) · Emily Browning

No sponsors, no adverts. But smash the like button and we'll plant a tree — verified by photographs of the same tree from several different angles.

This one's for Morgan, the show's fourth (unofficial) host, who joins us in photo form from here on. With us in spirit.

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Eighty-odd episodes of this show and every one of them has pointed the same way: up. Outgrow the spreadsheets, upgrade, migrate to the cloud, choose your first ERP.

This week Pete, Nirav and Emily go the other way and ask the question nobody puts on a slide — should you downgrade?

In this episode:

• What tier 1, upper tier 2 and lower tier 2 actually mean, straight from Panorama's 2026 report
• The five-user F&O implementation, and how overselling happens
• Why third-party ISVs have quietly closed the gap between the tiers
• Whether you can feed your ERP — and what happens to master data when you can't
• The utilisation audit: print the feature list, mark every line, count what you never use
• Why a downgrade is still a full migration, whatever the licence cost says

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah · Emily Browning

No sponsors, no adverts. Still nothing from Starlink. And we're not saying the accounting one out loud any more in case the AI starts advertising it at us.

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Pete opens the show with a fourth guest in the room: a live AI, talking back in real time, interruptible mid-sentence. It gives a perfectly competent answer about AI in ERP — augment, don't blindly automate — sings an unsolicited song about master data, and gets thrown off the show twice. Emily's verdict: it takes being told to shut up far better than any human.

In this episode:

• Why anomaly detection is the sensible first step — and why it's barely AI
• Using AI to clean master data, instead of waiting until the data is clean to use AI
• The semantic layer problem: define "customer", define "revenue", then ask again
• Vibecoded solutions, shovelware, and why 100% perfect is a trap
• Token costs, $100-a-day allowances, and why we're currently in Goldilocks land
• Agentic AI for onboarding new starters — the use case nobody's building yet

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP) · Emily Browning
Fourth guest: an AI, briefly, twice, badly behaved. It still needs a name — send suggestions.

No sponsors, no adverts. Still nothing from Starlink or QuickBooks.

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Think back to your first ERP go-live. If you just winced, this episode's for you.

Every prospect meeting has that one person — arms folded, thousand-yard stare, still processing something that happened fifteen years ago. They know the current system is failing. Everyone hates it. And they've quietly decided they are not going through that again.

Here's the argument Pete and Nirav make this week: the project that person is dreading no longer exists. Your second ERP migration isn't your first one repeated — it's a different project that happens to share a name. The integrations are APIs now, not custom code. The data comes out of a real database, not off a spike with the tickets still on it. Round two is genuinely easier… but there are new ways to squander that advantage, and they walk through all of them. (Emily's off this week, so it's two seats today — the partner and the data side, which for a topic this data-heavy is convenient.)

What you'll take away:

• Why the second migration is a schema-to-schema shift, not the paper-and-spreadsheets-to-data slog you remember — and why that changes everything
• What modern migration tooling — and the first "migration agents" — actually change about moving data between systems
• The asset nobody puts on the project plan: your team already knows what they want, including the 21-click reprint they'll never mention unless you ask
• Integrations that used to mean a developer and a custom build, and are now a configuration screen or a single checkbox
• The cloud maths — the whole infrastructure project that simply disappears, and why your support costs usually fall through the floor
• The four ways to blow it: like-for-like customisations, complacency, second-system syndrome, and data hoarding
• Why fifteen years of history belongs in a read-only data warehouse, not your shiny new ERP
• What to actually do in the next 90 days if your ERP genuinely does suck

Whether you're staring down an end-of-life system like Dynamics GP or classic NAV, or you're just tired of a platform that's quietly holding the business back, this one's about doing it again — and doing it better.

Key moments

• (01:35) Same name, different project
• (06:11) Paper-to-data vs data-to-data: the schema shift
• (07:03) The end-of-life wave — GP and classic NAV are on the clock
• (13:00) Data migration is a different sport now
• (17:19) 21 clicks to reprint a work order (and why only your people know)
• (19:28) Integrations: from custom code to a configuration screen
• (22:33) The infrastructure project that just vanished
• (33:15) Every customisation has to re-justify itself from zero
• (38:02) Data hoarding, and the read-only warehouse that fixes it
• (41:41) The 90-day plan: start with a town hall, not a shopping list

Resources & links

• Nirav Shah and the team do these migrations for a living — AdCirrus ERP · [email protected]
• Pete writes (and moans) about ERP, data and governance at petenicholson.co.uk · [email protected]
• Related listening: Upgrade or Migrate? (S4E12), ERP Data Migration: Best Practices & Common Mistakes (S1E18), and Why You Should NOT Customize Your ERP (S3E14).

Follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and leave a review if it was useful — it genuinely helps. No ads, no sponsorship, just two people who like ERP a bit more than is strictly healthy.

Hosted by Peter Nicholson and Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP). Emily Browning is off this week.

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Most mornings, someone in your business opens the same screen, sets the same filter and clicks the same button. Tomorrow they'll do it again. Acumatica will do all of it for you — on a timer, in the background, with no code, no integration and no consultant. It's called an automation schedule, it's already baked into the system you pay for, and it's one of the most underused features in it.

This week Pete and Nirav get hands-on. Nirav shares his screen and builds an automation schedule live from scratch — auto-invoicing confirmed shipments — while Pete brings the view from inside a business that went live on Acumatica almost a year ago and has only recently started switching automations on. (Emily's off this week, so it's two seats today: the partner and the data side.)

What you'll take away:

• Why automating a process in Acumatica is now configuration, not customisation — and why that changes who's allowed to do it
• Automation schedules vs business events: proactive on a timer, versus reactive on a trigger
• The "learn to fly the plane first" rule — why Pete's team ran everything manually for six months before automating a single thing
• Which processes to automate on day one, and which to leave alone until the business has found its rhythm
• How to build a schedule live from any process screen, plus the green-button rule for spotting candidates in seconds
• The one checkbox — use shipment date for invoice date — that can quietly knock two weeks off your customers' payment terms
• Why automation schedules fail silently, the sequential-stop trap, and the governance habit that keeps them honest

Whether you've just gone live or you've been on Acumatica for years and never noticed the little clock icon, this one pays for itself in time saved.

Key moments

• (01:51) The feature nobody talks about
• (03:56) Build it in a sandbox first
• (06:20) Customisation vs configuration
• (10:04) Learn to fly the plane first
• (19:52) Demo: where the schedules live
• (30:00) Building one live: auto-invoicing shipments
• (36:45) The green-button rule
• (41:28) The checkbox that steals payment terms
• (43:58) Silent failures and who owns the schedules
• (47:19) Where the ROI hides

Resources & links

• 🎥 Watch the live demo on YouTube — this was a screen-share episode, so you can see the schedule being built.
• Nirav Shah and the team set these up for a living — AdCirrus ERP · [email protected]
• Pete writes about ERP, data and governance at petenicholson.co.uk · [email protected]
• Free Acumatica training on this topic lives in Acumatica Open University.

Follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and leave a review if it was useful — it genuinely helps. No ads, no sponsorship, just two people who like ERP a bit more than is strictly healthy.

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A small business owner posted on r/ERP that they'd outgrown their patchwork of spreadsheets and SaaS apps — and had heard they'd need an ERP "once they hit a certain size." They just couldn't work out where that line was. The post sat unanswered. So Pete, Nirav and Emily took the question on.

No top fives, no checklists this week — just a straight conversation about what actually pushes a growing business onto an ERP, what holds it back, and whether the leap is as scary as it sounds.

In this episode:

• Why the first real signal is frustration, not revenue — and how owner burnout quietly turns into business risk
• Why hiring another body rarely fixes a broken process (it just moves the burnout around)
• The silo trap: how sensible point-solution decisions — Shopify, ShipStation, QuickBooks, Fishbowl, a bit of Google Docs — stop adding up
• Putting a number on the pain: the value-justification time study and cost per transaction
• Treating a modern ERP like a 24/7 worker with its own hourly rate
• When you're not ready for an ERP — and the one question to ask any VAR before you sign
• Why 80% of spreadsheets carry errors, and what that does to your weekly numbers

The line that summed it all up: you don't grow into an ERP, you stop growing without one.

Related episodes:

• S04E13 — How to Choose an ERP: Where Do You Even Start?
• S2E04 — When Do You Need an ERP System? 5 Signs You've Outgrown Spreadsheets
• S3E06 — How to Build the Perfect ERP Implementation Team

The ABCs of ERP & Beyond is hosted by Peter Nicholson, Nirav Shah, and Emily Browning. New episodes every two weeks on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and everywhere else you catch your podcasts.

Got a question like the one that sparked this episode? Drop us a comment or message — we read them, and they make for good episodes.

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Choosing the wrong ERP is one of the most expensive mistakes a business can make — and it rarely happens because the software was bad. It happens because the company never worked out what it actually needed before it fell for a slick demo. The tech demo always works. That's the entire point of the tech demo.

In this episode Pete, Emily, and Nirav walk through how to choose an ERP properly, from both sides: the inward look at your own business, and the outward look at the market. It's the first time the show has tackled the selection question head-on — and the short version is that almost all the work happens before you ever email a vendor.

What we cover:

• Why "it's old" and "it's expensive" are symptoms, not reasons — and the real question to ask: what can't you do today that's costing you money?
• Why fit beats age every time (a 15-year-old system that still fits the business is not a problem)
• The "do nothing" option — and why a lot of what you want from a new ERP, you can do without one
• Know who you are: revenue, users, sites, countries, industry, compliance — the facts that quietly shrink your shortlist
• Why you choose on fit first and cost second (ROI shows up in years three to six, not year one)
• Why "know your processes" is the most important step — and the test that proves whether you actually do
• Ask why you do something, not what you do — and let your project manager be the internal consultant
• Non-negotiables vs preferences in disguise — and the one-line test that separates them
• Where to start the market research: G2, Compare Software, Info-Tech, industry associations, Reddit, and yes, AI
• How to handle demos: every demo works, so your job is to break it — on your data, with your hardest questions
• Why the implementation partner matters as much as the ERP, and the red flags that should make you walk

If you're about to be handed the "which ERP should we get?" question — or you're the one handing it over — start here. Done properly, choosing an ERP takes four to eight months. This episode is how you spend that time well.

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Every ERP project starts with someone saying "we need to do something about our systems". The two real options on the table are usually upgrade or migrate — and most teams treat them as if they're the same kind of project at different scales. They aren't. They're different operating models, with different costs, different risks, and different reasons to choose them.

This is the first episode in our mini-series on the upgrade vs migrate question. Pete, Emily, and Nirav lay out the framing — what actually makes a project an upgrade versus a migration, why vendors keep mis-labelling one as the other, and how to do the cost comparison properly so you don't pick the wrong path on day one.

What we cover:

• Where the "we need to do something" conversation actually comes from — and why the trigger shapes the answer
• Why "do nothing" is also a decision (and the boiling frog problem that hides its cost)
• The real definition of an upgrade versus a migration — and the test that tells you which one you're actually doing
• Why most "upgrades" are migrations in disguise, especially anything with the word "cloud" bolted onto an existing product
• How to do the cost comparison properly — sticker price versus total cost of ownership versus the cost of doing nothing
• Why migration is sometimes the cheaper option, even though it never looks that way on the quote
• The hidden cost nobody puts on the spreadsheet — internal preparation

If you've been handed the "should we upgrade or migrate?" question — or you're about to be — this is the framing episode to start with. The rest of the mini-series will go deeper on each piece.

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