ERP rollouts rarely fail on day one. They stall around week six, once the initial enthusiasm wears off and the real complexity of migrating historical data becomes clear.
The most common cause is scope creep disguised as customization — every department wants the system to match their existing spreadsheet workflow exactly, which multiplies configuration work.
Second is inadequate data cleanup before migration. Garbage data in a spreadsheet is annoying; garbage data in an ERP becomes a permanent structural problem.
Third, training gets scheduled too early, before the configuration is stable, so users learn a version of the system that changes before go-live.
The fix is a phased rollout with a hard-locked scope for phase one, a dedicated data-cleanup sprint, and training scheduled in the final two weeks before launch, not the first two.