As a software company, we’re always looking for – and working towards - repeatable processes, both for our own efficiency and in order to pass along the benefit of that efficiency to our customers, in the tangible form of cost savings.   This goal is so woven into the fabric of our company that we’ve put a lot of thought and effort into how to provide fixed price upgrades for our customers, which is exactly what we’ve been doing this year.  And, we’ve mapped out a process that can be completed in four weeks, including a two week User Acceptance Test (UAT) period.  We’re pretty proud of that, and it’s been well received by our customers too.   

Compare that to the revelations in the 2012 Oracle Applications User Group Survey, “ERP Upgrades: What’s Your Philosophy?”   The survey’s executive summary states: “The typical length of time for an enterprise/ERP upgrade is between six and 12 months, as cited by 44 percent of respondents.”  A little further in the report, it turns out that 32% of the survey participants reported that their upgrade took over 12 months.   Only 9% of respondents completed their upgrade in three to six months, and only 3% in less than three months.

Granted, 72% of the respondents were from mid- to large-sized businesses, which the survey defines as over 1,000 employees (see Figure 7, page 10).  Even if we assume that the 27% defined as “small businesses” generally took less time to upgrade, some of those small businesses went through long upgrade processes.

Just do the math.  27% of the survey respondents are “small businesses” and only 12% of the survey total completed their upgrades in less than six months…. 

Maybe these were the exceptions mentioned in the survey, where it states that: “the vast majority of ERP upgrade efforts tend to be short in duration, fall within reasonable budgets, and rarely disrupt the business at large?”  Because I really can’t see how a 6+ month upgrade could have a reasonable cost and not disrupt a small business.