ERP re-platforming under independent oversight

An industrial manufacturer was running its third attempt at retiring a 19-year-old ERP. The first attempt had been abandoned at selection; the second had reached month 16, consumed $6M, and been stopped by the board. The system now constrained everything the operating model wanted to do — and the organisation had learned to distrust every plan that promised otherwise.

The board’s condition for a third attempt was structural: whoever built the system would not be the party telling the board how the build was going.

The forensic review of attempt two found no villain, only architecture: requirements had been gathered as a wish list rather than derived from an operating model, scope had grown 40% without a single contested change request, and the integrator had reported its own progress — green until the week it was red.

The enterprise blueprint drawn in the first four weeks exposed the real scope: of 212 requirements carried over from attempt two, 79 traced to no operating decision and were removed before selection began.

Selection ran against the blueprint, not a feature matrix — three vendors tested on reference operations, contracts written against outcomes with exit terms priced. HolisticAutomation was contracted separately for build and integration, and Markham’s oversight was contracted to the board, not the programme: weekly readouts of readiness against baseline, with scope changes contested in a forum that could say no. Thirty-eight of forty-one were declined.

Cutover happened when the written readiness criteria passed — one planned weekend, zero days of unplanned downtime, and a stabilisation period that ended with verification rather than a party.

Readiness criteria written and agreed before build began; outcomes verified under MKM-F-003 after stabilisation.