Case Study - A Fast-Track ERP Selection for a Multi-Site Industrial Fabricator
A rapidly growing industrial fabricator with several U.S. sites and an overseas manufacturing relationship needed to replace QuickBooks and a patchwork of spreadsheets and point tools with a single ERP system of record. Growth and a new facility put a hard deadline on the decision. John Hannan LLC led a fixed-scope selection program that moved from requirements to signed software and implementation-partner agreements in under three months, finishing under the hours budget.
The situation
The company serves critical-infrastructure and industrial markets, with engineering, fabrication, coatings, integration, assembly, testing and shipping spread across sites that work differently: one site runs engineer-to-order and project-based work, another runs more repeatable manufacturing. Finance lived in QuickBooks. Operations lived in spreadsheets, a CRM, a CAD and product-data system, HR and expense tools and site-specific shop-floor apps. The result was duplicate entry, inconsistent data and no cross-functional view of inventory, shortages or schedule status.
Leadership wanted an ERP that could become the backbone for planning, purchasing timing, material visibility, inventory control, project and job costing, production execution, quality traceability, shipping, billing and management reporting, with a Phase 1 minimum viable product live inside the year and a roadmap for everything else.
What we did
The program ran as a staged, evidence-based evaluation, led by John Hannan LLC with the client's own project team owning the decision.
Business drivers and goals were written down first: clear-to-build visibility, inventory and warehouse control, mixed-mode manufacturing, project and job costing, the engineering hand-off from CAD and PDM into items, BOMs and routings, outside processing, order-to-cash complexity (deposits, milestone and shipment billing) and reporting.
A formal RFP for ERP software and implementation services went to the market. Four written responses came back and were scored for company-specific fit, delivery readiness, commercial clarity and timeline credibility.
Three finalists advanced to scripted demonstrations, each with its implementation partner. A fourth platform was not advanced because its response was illustrative rather than committed.
Finalists had three weeks' notice and up to seven hours to demonstrate against the priority requirements. Business-process owners scored only the sessions they attended, using criteria tied to those requirements, and debriefs captured what the numbers could not.
John Hannan LLC consolidated the scorecards, summarized sentiment, strengths and concerns, built a three-year total-cost-of-ownership matrix that normalized very different vendor quotes, and wrote the decision document the client will keep on file.
The decision
The written responses, the demonstrations and the cost analysis pointed in different directions, which is normal. One finalist had the strongest written proposal and delivery governance but scored lowest in the demonstrations. One had the strongest value case but raised questions about engineering data ingestion and warehouse execution. One had the strongest product breadth in quality, traceability, finance and lifecycle scalability, with execution confidence and pricing clarity still to be validated.
Two follow-up sessions with that vendor's implementation team, covering licensing, the accelerated timeline and the internal staffing it would take, closed the gaps. The client's project team added its own decision attributes (maintenance burden and architectural complexity) and selected IFS Cloud with its partner. Contracts were executed within days of the recommendation, and the selection closed 5.6% under its hours budget.
What changed
A pre-implementation preparation phase followed immediately: scope validation, data-readiness tracking, engineering hand-off validation with sample CAD data, warehouse and shop-floor transaction design, named business-process and data owners, governance and go-live criteria, all before the implementation kickoff. That phase also finished under budget, largely because part of its scope was cut early once the team had what it needed.
The client now has a documented, defensible decision record; a Phase 1 scope list and a deferred-scope list; a risk and mitigation plan covering engineering metadata, scope creep, data readiness, warehouse usability, partner depth, reporting expectations, quality scope and licensing; and an implementation that started with its guardrails already in place.
If your program looks like this, talk to John about your ERP program.