Three weeks after a textile company went live with its new ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, the accounting manager turned to the consultant and said: ‘I can’t get my monthly sales report. You set up the wrong thing.’ The consultant pulled out the document signed at the start of the project. That report was never mentioned in it. Both sides felt justified, and the project was already in trouble. This scenario plays out regularly in ERP implementations across Turkey. The fix is not in the software. It is in the decisions made during the first week of the project.
When companies install an ERP program, everyone assumes the system does everything. The vendor usually encourages this belief. But a program only does what it is told. If no one writes down which reports are needed, in what format, and how often, the go-live date turns into a blame session. The accountant says the software is incomplete. The consultant says no one asked for it. The owner is caught in the middle. The only way to prevent this argument is to build a report inventory before any configuration begins.
A report inventory means this: write down every report currently used in the business, who uses it, when they need it, and what it contains. No complicated method is required. Draw columns on a sheet of paper: report name, the person who uses it, frequency (daily, weekly, monthly), and the data it draws from. Ask the accountant, the warehouse supervisor, and the sales manager separately. Each of them carries a different picture in their head. Putting those pictures together reveals the real list. In most small and mid-sized businesses this list runs between fifteen and forty reports. At this stage it is also worth marking which reports are essential and which are simply nice to have.
Once the list exists, the next step is agreeing on sample formats. This step gets skipped often, and that is exactly where problems start. When an accountant says ‘I want a monthly revenue report,’ she has a specific table in mind. The consultant has a different table in mind. Both say ‘monthly revenue report’ but mean different things. The fix is straightforward: take a printout or an old spreadsheet showing that report, mark by hand which columns are needed and which totals should appear, and have both sides sign it. Even a single sheet of paper with handwritten notes becomes the most valuable document in the project once it carries both signatures.
The third step is data source verification. A report can only be produced if the data behind it exists in the system. If the sales manager asks for a profitability report by customer, that means a cost figure must be entered against every sale. Does the company currently track costs at that level? Is product-level cost calculation being done today? These questions need answers before configuration starts, not after. In many businesses, it turns out this data is never recorded. The report is technically impossible to produce — not because the software is limited, but because the data simply is not there. A report list built without checking data sources stays on paper.
In practice, these three steps meet resistance. Business owners say they have no time to sit down and write things out, and assume the consultant already knows. Consultants say the client should tell them what is needed and they will build it. Both sides avoid this part of the work. The result is a crisis at go-live. The project runs long, extra work appears, and arguments over additional fees follow. A two-day meeting and a few pages of documentation at the start would have prevented most of it. This kind of agreement can be reached through a face-to-face meeting or even a fax exchange — no special tool is needed.
Any small or mid-sized business owner investing in an ERP program should ask the consultant three direct questions at the start: ‘Will you deliver a written report list? Will you get sign-off on sample formats? Will you show me which data each report depends on?’ If the answer to any of these is not a clear yes, those points belong in the contract. Saying ‘these are the reports I need’ at the beginning saves far more time, money, and frustration than saying ‘I can’t get my reports’ after go-live.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on June 23, 2003 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.