What to Look for in a Manufacturing ERP
Choosing an ERP is one of the biggest technology decisions a manufacturing shop makes. Get it right and your shop runs smoother for years. Get it wrong and you've spent months and thousands on a system nobody uses. Here's what actually matters — from a shop's perspective, not a vendor's.
The three questions that matter
Before feature lists and demos, answer these: (1) Can I be productive on day one? If the system requires weeks of setup and training before you see value, it's going to fail. Your team has jobs to run — they can't stop production to learn software. (2) Does it connect the things I care about? Quoting should flow to jobs, jobs should flow to invoices, and you should see margins without exporting to Excel. (3) Can I afford it at my current size AND when I double? Per-user pricing that costs $300/month today might cost $3,000/month when you have 30 people.
Red flags in ERP evaluation
The vendor won't tell you the price without a demo and "needs assessment." The implementation timeline is measured in months. You need a paid consultant to configure basic features. The word "customization" comes up in every conversation. The demo looks amazing but the actual product requires 6 months to match it. The contract has a multi-year lock-in.
What to prioritize
For a job shop under 50 employees: (1) quoting with routing and materials, (2) job tracking with operation-level time entry, (3) scheduling with visual resource management, (4) quality basics (NCR, inspections), (5) invoicing from sales orders. Everything else is nice to have. If a system nails these five, it's worth evaluating. If it's missing any of them, keep looking.
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