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… that, in many cases, the best system for a company looking to purchase an ERP system is not an ERP system.
ERP Mistakes #3: Not Considering Open Source ERP
One of the first things the ERP system selection advisors will do is rule out open source ERP. The major IT consulting firms only want to implement commercial ERP solutions to make the highest profits. Even supposedly non-implementing advisors like Panorama Consulting rule out open source, as is covered in the article How Predictable Was Panorama Consulting’s Opinion on Open Source ERP?
Open source ERP should be considered as …

… customized than proprietary ERP systems. And this gets to the next mistake.
Mistake #4: Underestimating the Amount of Custom Development
Both the IT consulting firms and the ERP software vendors make a big effort to delude the customer into thinking that there will be far less customization required of an ERP system than there will be in practice.
There are several reasons for this.

The ERP vendor will, without fail, overstate how much of a match their functionality is for the requirements as they are trying to sell an ERP system.
The IT consulting firm is essentially a proxy for

… many cases, willing to provide misleading or false information to the customer.
As for the last part of the quote, finding and hiring employees to manage an internal system will always be less expensive and more sustainable than hiring resources from the ERP vendor or less knowledgeable resources from the consulting firm partnered with the ERP vendor. Furthermore, supporting software internally will normally allow far better support at a much lower cost. Most ERP vendors use the support contract to get a lot of their profits, so the support offered is typically quite cut down. And the larger the software …

… not “lying” however, they do everything they can to keep the clients for realizing their clear conflicts of interest. So to me, this does fall into the category of lying.
The vast majority of IT decisions are supported by the most biased financial advice imaginable. The advice of large IT consulting firms, without exclusion, is to direct software purchases to those areas that maximize the consulting revenues of the IT consulting firm providing the advice. How IT consulting firms rig RFPs. The RFP outcome will invariably result in a recommendation that makes more money for the IT consulting firm. This …