The Rescue Is Cheaper Than the Restart
Panorama's 2026 ERP Report finds more than a quarter of projects over budget and almost a quarter over schedule. Before you start over, find out what you already own.
Andrew S. Collier · Founder & Managing Principal, Collier & Associates · October 2, 2026
Panorama Consulting Group's 2026 ERP Report covers 170 organizations with projects completed or underway between January 2025 and January 2026 — median revenue $200.5 million, median timeline nine months. More than a quarter reported their project over budget. Almost a quarter reported it over schedule. The most common cause of a budget overrun was the unexpected need for additional technology: in Panorama's words, organizations discover fatal misfits late in the project and turn to additional technology, scope expansion, and custom builds. The most common cause of a schedule overrun was organizational — governance, resistance to change, process redesign.
Those are the projects that finished well enough to answer a survey. The ones I get called about are the ones that stalled: a second attempt with a third consulting firm, a platform two integrators couldn't make operational, a prime contractor that walked out at month six.
Panorama Consulting Group, The 2026 ERP Report — 170 organizations, January 2025 – January 2026
Three outcomes, not a continuum
Every engagement in this lane starts with an assessment, and the assessment answers one question: does anything need to be done?
There are three honest answers:
Nothing — what you own works, fits the operating model, and carries acceptable risk, and I say so in writing.
Improve or rescue what is in place — adjustments, reconfiguration, education and training, relicensing or a new MSA, a different partner, a change in the IT organization; short-term for survival, long-term for fit.
Or replace — and only that answer leads to a formal RFI with weighted requirements and scored vendor responses. Most assessments land in the middle. The platform is rarely the problem. The master data, the modifications, and the training almost always are.
The assessment's three outcomes — only one of them leads to a formal selection
Four rescues
Capco, a federal military manufacturing contractor, was facing fines and possible suspension over production shortages and cost overruns. Two consulting firms had spent more than six months failing to make the company's existing Microsoft Dynamics GP platform operational.
I did not recommend a new system. I assessed the inventory, manufacturing, and supply chain processes and took Inventory Management and Purchasing live on the platform the client already owned in under two months. The suspension was averted. The VP of Supply Chain wrote afterward that I was the first consultant he'd worked with "to be completely honest about his assessment and recommendations."
Columbia Pipe — 250,000 active SKUs across 18 distribution centers — was midway through its second JD Edwards EnterpriseOne attempt with its third consulting firm. The prior firm had customized JDE with thousands of modifications to replicate the legacy system and launched with minimal training; the result was ineffective from day one. The rescue took twenty-one months: whiteboard sessions to get agreement on approach before anything was reconfigured, a new master data taxonomy for generic items, re-implementation of forecasting, multi-facility DRP, MRP, and lot-controlled inventory, and a SIOP framework built in PL/SQL on top of the ERP. About 99% of manual, error-prone planning and purchasing execution was eliminated; the planners review and approve before purchase orders execute.
Grote, a Tier 1 automotive parts manufacturer, had a JDE implementation over budget with manufacturing functionality and data conversions on their third failed start, and the relationship between management and the consulting team had turned political. Nine months and a 50-plus-person matrix team later, roughly 1,800 daily active work orders were automated, with planning and scheduling of sub-components to and from Mexico and Canada.
At Comdial, a telecom equipment manufacturer with two plants and two lines of business, the prime consulting firm exited at month six over contractual disagreements. I took over as project manager and drove the 100-plus-person team to completion in eleven months — real-time sales-order completion replacing a two-to-eight-hour turnaround, after 15 Advanced Pricing configurations retired more than a million manually documented pricing structures.
Capco, Columbia Pipe, Grote, and Comdial — four rescues on platforms the client already owned
What a rescue actually does
The sequence is the same every time. Get agreement on the approach at the whiteboard and sponsor approval before touching configuration. Fix the master data first — item taxonomies, units of measure, product data — because no module works on top of bad master data. Strip the modifications that exist only to make the new system behave like the old one. Train the people who will run it, which was skipped almost entirely in the Columbia Pipe first attempt.
And stabilize the politics. Panorama's finding that organizational issues are the leading cause of schedule overrun matches the record. At Grote, the first job was stabilizing the relationship between the owners, the board, the executives, and the consultants. At Alstom Power, the executive team and the Americas divisions could not collectively approve the master data taxonomy the new operating model required, so I recommended an off-site, full-day Kaizen with every deciding executive in the room until it was decided. It was.
Before you restart
Panorama reports a year-over-year increase in organizations seeking third-party project-auditing guidance — leaders intervening when they sense drift rather than waiting for failure. One audit in the report found that a city had paid for work billed as complete that was not.
An assessment takes weeks, not quarters: what you own, how well it works, and the risks — end-of-life software and platforms, poor implementation, missing functionality, workaround-heavy staff, cybersecurity. It opens with the BAS™ task-level model, because the hours your people spend working around the system are the business case for whichever of the three outcomes follows.
Where to go from here
A stalled implementation costs you every day it stays stalled, and most of them are recoverable on the platform you already own. If this looks like your situation, Enterprise Systems Strategy, Implementation & Recovery is built for exactly this — an assessment that answers whether to leave it, rescue it, or replace it — and the rescue when that's the answer.
Direct: 502-317-8900 · andy@andrew-collier.com · andrew-collier.com · linkedin.com/in/andrewscollier
Andrew S. Collier · Founder & Managing Principal, Collier & Associates · Greater Louisville, KY
Creator of BAS™, the task-level cost, capacity, and value model behind the BAS™ Value Creation Sprint. 40 years in enterprise transformation; 100+ enterprise systems engagements; 40+ business transformations; 29 JD Edwards implementations; six interim CIO, CTO, and IT Director roles; 6+ years of PE M&A transactions as advisor to PwC, Deloitte, and Crosslake Technologies.
Sources: Panorama Consulting Group, The 2026 ERP Report; Collier & Associates engagement record (Capco; Columbia Pipe, 2015–17; Grote; Comdial; Alstom Power, 2005–07).
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