GFOA Resources for NIGP Forum 2025

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects provide opportunities to upgrade technology, modernize processes and policy, adopt best practices, and transform administrative practices and outcomes throughout an organization. ERP projects are also high profile, expensive, and difficult. They require coordination and alignment between vendor and staff resources. Procurement professionals can serve a critical role in using the procurement process to drive readiness activities and make the right selection for ERP supplier. Focus will be on establishing outcome oriented requirements that can be used to help select the best value supplier. In addition, the session will highlight strategies to manage the evaluation team, define a process for evaluating proposals, and navigate the selection process with emphasis on reducing bias and properly weighing key decision factors. GFOA has done recent research into behavioral science and decision architecture that will be used as basis for group activities. 

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects can present major challenges for organizations and many face risk of cost overruns, delays, difficulty in dealing with change, testing failures, business continuity and more. This session will focus on key risk areas within ERP contracts. GFOA assists local governments with contract negotiations and will draw from this experience to highlight current examples, market trends, and successful negotiation strategies. All ERP projects should have a detailed statement of work and contract that provides protection with milestone payments, clear deliverables, service level agreements, and other tools for accountability. In addition, the workshop will use interactive exercises and real examples to highlight common industry terms and strategies for negotiating away unfavorable terms found in most supplier contract templates that lead to changer orders. 

GFOA’s experience and research on ERP projects shows that time and again that success or failure with ERP projects is not determined by the vendor you chose, the capabilities of the actual software, or other outside factors. The biggest predictor of project success is whether an organization is prepared going in.

For the past 25 years, GFOA has provided resources and services to help organizations navigate the path to an ERP system replacement, and one component that is essential to our approach is the development of functional requirements.

GFR article on strategies for negotiation an ERP contract

GFR article on ERP governance and role of the financial foundation framework

GFR article on ERP governance and the role of a steering committee

GFR article on staffing an ERP project