ERP Optimization Services A Contract Crew for the Year After Go-Live
We walk your live system, price every open item, and staff the crew that closes the list.
Invoices over $5,000 still get approved by email reply. Item one of fourteen on the walkthrough below.
ERP optimization services are a 6-to-16-week contract project that clears what a live ERP piles up after go-live, from approvals done by email to dead customizations and duplicate vendors. KORE1 sizes the crew from that list and staffs it.
Last updated: October 3, 2026
- In scope
- The system work still open twelve months or more after go-live, on any ERP, closed by a contract crew that leaves when the last item on the list is done.
- Out of scope
- The first weeks live are a hypercare and go-live support job. People who were trained and still won’t use the system are an ERP user adoption problem. An implementation that never made it live needs project rescue staffing instead.
Go-live has a date on it. The cut list doesn’t. Approval routing was going to come later, and so were the margin report and the cleanup of a vendor file somebody migrated in a hurry the week before cutover weekend. Then the project team disbanded, the partner moved on to its next client, and the list stayed exactly where it was.
A year later the ERP works, sort of, because orders ship and the books close while a surprising amount of the real work happens next to the system, in spreadsheets, inboxes and one controller’s memory. Not failed. Unfinished. Finishing it is a contract job we staff through KORE1’s ERP consultant staffing practice, which has placed technology people since 2005.
An ERP Optimization Walkthrough, Fourteen Months In
On a job site it’s called the punch list. People already work in the building and the lights come on, and a superintendent goes room to room with blue painter’s tape, putting a strip on every cracked tile and every door that sticks, so the right trade comes back for it. We do the same walk through an ERP that’s been live for a year or so.
Punch list
- Payables Invoices over $5,000 approved by email reply, then keyed in by hand. Approval routing inside the ERP, with limits by department. Functional 40 h
- Inventory On-hand counts reconciled every Friday in a side spreadsheet. Bin and lot setup corrected so cycle counts post where they happen. Functional 80 h
- Close The month-end accrual rebuilt from an export, every month. A recurring journal template that reverses on day one. Functional 24 h
- Item master Units of measure set up three different ways. One rule per unit type, enforced on every new item. Functional 40 h
- Sales Margin by customer built in Excel from three exports. The same report inside the ERP, scheduled. Reporting 60 h
- Operations Two departments, two definitions of an open order. One definition, one saved report, one named owner. Reporting 32 h
- Finance A 30-tab board package assembled by hand each quarter. Financial report rows in the ERP, a BI layer for the rest. Reporting 96 h
- Customization A go-live pricing script the vendor’s own pricing has since replaced. Move to native price levels, retire the script, retest orders. Developer 96 h
- Customization 212 custom fields, 61 of them never filled in. Retire the empty ones after checking every report and feed that reads them. Developer 56 h
- Integration The web-order import fails quietly about once a week. Error handling, plus an alert that goes to one named person. Developer 64 h
- Vendor master About 1,900 vendor records, roughly 260 of them probable duplicates. Merge rules, one surviving record each, and a block on new duplicates. Developer 104 h
- Purchasing Buyers hired since go-live were never shown the purchase order screen. Referred. A training gap, not a system gap. Adoption Ref
- Licensing Full user licenses held by people who only ever approve. Referred. A license review, priced on its own. License Ref
- Warehouse The business wants a warehouse management module it never bought. Referred. A new module is an implementation, scoped separately. New scope Ref
Functional184 h6 weeks
Reporting188 h6 weeks
Developer320 h10 weeks, sets the length
692 hours3 contractors10 weeksAbout $96,880
Eleven strips of tape, and three items we handed to somebody else.
Look at twelve through fourteen before you look at the tape. Twelve is a buyer nobody trained, and you can’t configure your way out of that. Fourteen is a warehouse module somebody slipped onto a cleanup list, which is roughly how a ten-week project becomes a second implementation with no budget line. Neither gets tape.
Then the tally, bottom up. The developer has 320 hours, nearly twice anyone else, so the engagement runs ten weeks and the functional and reporting people leave around week six. Cheaper that way. We priced it off the same ERP consultant rate guide anyone can read.
What Lands on an ERP Optimization List
Every walkthrough we’ve seen sorts into the same four piles. The proportions change. The piles don’t.
- Settings nobody finishedThe ERP already does the job and was never set up to. Approval limits, recurring journals, cycle counts. Usually the cheapest fixes on the list, and the ones people are most embarrassed about.
- Reports that live in ExcelSomebody exports, pastes and formats the same numbers. Every week. When two of those spreadsheets disagree, the meeting is about the spreadsheets.
- Customizations past their dateScripts and fields built for go-live that the vendor has since made native, or that nothing reads anymore. They still run.
- Master data that driftedDuplicate vendors, inconsistent units, customers entered four ways. Migration got it in. Nobody owned keeping it clean.
Customizations cost the most to leave alone, which surprises people. A cloud ERP updates on the vendor’s calendar, not yours. NetSuite opens a Release Preview account twice a year so you can test before each release lands, and Microsoft ships Dynamics 365 in two release waves a year, starting in April and October.
Every script still running is one more thing to retest each time. Retire the dead ones. The next release gets cheaper.
Where ERP Optimization Sits After Go-Live
Five engagements get called “post go-live support” at one point or another. They start at different times and fix different things.
| Engagement | When it starts | What it fixes | Usual length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Go-live and hypercare | Cutover weekend | Whatever breaks while people learn the new system for real | The first few weeks live, tapering off |
| User adoption | Before cutover | People who were trained and still go around the system | Roughly the first ninety days |
| ERP optimization | Twelve months or more after go-live | Settings, reports, customizations and master data nobody finished | 6 to 16 weeks, then the crew leaves |
| A project not yet live | Before go-live | An implementation that slipped | A different engagement, through go-live |
| Reimplementation | When the design itself is wrong | Subsidiaries, chart of accounts, the item model | Months. Priced like a new project |
Twelve months isn’t magic. It’s one full year-end close and, on most cloud platforms, two vendor releases. By then you know which workarounds are habits and which ones are holes. Panorama Consulting makes a similar point about going back over the features deferred at go-live once the system settles.
Sizing the Crew From the List
The usual pitch runs the other way. Here’s a team of five, now let’s find them something to do. Ours starts from the trade column, and if no item on the list says Reporting, nobody bills you for a report developer.
- Functional consultantGets every item where the software already does the job and nobody switched it on. The good ones used to sit in your chair, a former controller or warehouse manager who later learned to configure the thing, so nobody has to explain payables to them.
- Report and BI developerKills the Friday spreadsheets. One definition per number, argued out once and written down. They’ll build in the ERP’s own report writer before reaching for Power BI, which only earns its license when a question spans two systems.
- DeveloperPulls out dead scripts, patches the integrations, writes the vendor merge. On NetSuite that’s SuiteScript, on Business Central it’s AL, on SAP it’s ABAP. Ask which customization they’d delete first. Good ones have an answer.
Small lists close in six weeks with two people. Bigger ones, with several entities and a tangle of integrations, can run sixteen, and there we’ll usually suggest cutting the list into two phases so you aren’t paying three people to wait on one developer. Sometimes that advice costs us hours. Fine.
One seat stays on your payroll. Each process owner, meaning the AP lead, the inventory manager and whoever owns the close, needs an hour or two a week to test fixes and sign them off. Skip that and the crew sits idle by week three. We can’t hire that person for you.
2 a year
NetSuite releases, each with a preview account to test in first
5 days
of testing Microsoft gives Dynamics 365 Finance before an update reaches production
17 days
from intake to hire, on average, for a KORE1 IT search
92%
twelve-month retention across the people KORE1 places
Release facts from Oracle NetSuite and Microsoft Learn documentation, read October 2026. The five days are business days, for Finance, Supply Chain Management and Commerce service updates. Retention and speed come from KORE1’s own hiring numbers.
How the Work Gets Bought
Same list, same crew. The paperwork changes with how much of the risk you want to hold.
Bill by the hour
Project crew
Contractors on our W-2, managed against the punch list, gone when the last piece of tape comes off.
Project staffingPrice the result
Fixed price per item
A fixed price per item once the walkthrough is done, for teams that would rather buy outcomes than hours.
SOW staffing servicesAdd one seat
A single contractor
When your own admin can take most of the list and only needs a developer for the scripts.
ERP staff augmentationKeep an owner
Permanent ERP owner
When the walkthrough proves the real gap is nobody owning the system day to day.
Direct hire staffing
That last card comes up more than you’d think. Plenty of punch lists are really one missing job description, often a NetSuite administrator or its equivalent on another platform, and closing fourteen items without fixing that only resets the clock on another year of side spreadsheets and Friday exports. If you run NetSuite, Colin Boothe’s NetSuite optimization playbook walks the same ground from the owner’s chair, and if you want findings before committing to fixes, start with a read-only NetSuite health check. For the payables item on the list, his piece on NetSuite AP automation weighs native bill capture against a bolt-on.
How an ERP Optimization Engagement Runs
Four stages, in this order.
- Walk the systemThe functional lead spends the first week or two with whoever runs payables, inventory, the close and the reports. Every workaround goes on the list with where it lives and how often it happens. So does every customization, with the date it last ran.
- Price each item on its ownHours. Trade. A one-line reason. Items that belong to another engagement get referred instead of absorbed.
- Staff the tradesThe tally decides the crew. We place them, usually inside the 17 days our IT searches average, and the longest trade starts first.
- Close out and hand backEach closed item gets a named owner, a short note on what changed, and a test to run before the next vendor release. Then the tape comes off and the crew rolls off.
Step two is where most optimization projects go wrong. Bundle twelve fixes into one line called “cleanup” and nobody can tell which of them broke the invoice run on the first Monday of the month, which is exactly when the controller needs it working. Colin Boothe, who runs technology at Foretopia as its CIO and writes for KORE1, wrote the rule into his firm’s change-control process. “Changes are not bundled to avoid assessment.”
We hold the crew to it. Master data gets the same discipline, because a merge is permanent. Our systems consolidation page goes deeper on survivor rules when the duplicates run into the thousands.
Common Questions
What do ERP optimization services actually include?
Mostly the work that got cut to make the go-live date. In practice that means approval routing, reports rebuilt inside the ERP, retiring customizations nothing needs anymore, cleaning master data, and fixing integrations that fail at two in the morning without telling anyone. Training and license reviews usually sit outside it.
How much does ERP optimization cost?
$96,880 is what the fourteen-item example on this page comes to, at 692 hours and $140 an hour. Your list sets your number. A short one closes in six weeks with two people, and a multi-entity list with integration work can run sixteen.
How long after go-live should we wait?
Twelve months is a sensible floor. That gets you one full year-end close and, on NetSuite or Dynamics 365, two vendor releases, so you can see which workarounds are habits and which are real holes in the setup. Anything urgent before then is a hypercare job.
Can our implementation partner do this instead?
Sure, and sometimes they should. They know the design. The catch is that a fair number of punch-list items trace back to decisions the partner made, and a crew that works only for you is freer to say so. Some companies use both, with the partner on the platform questions and a contract crew on the list.
Is this only for NetSuite?
No. We staff the same engagement on NetSuite, Dynamics 365 Business Central and Finance, SAP Business One and S/4HANA, Oracle Fusion, Acumatica, Epicor and Sage Intacct. The method holds across all of them. The developer changes with the platform, because the code underneath doesn’t translate.
Should we fix our ERP or replace it?
Most companies asking that have a punch-list problem, not a platform problem. If the items are settings, reports, customizations and dirty data, optimize. Keep the platform. If the subsidiary structure, chart of accounts or item model is wrong at the root, you’re looking at reimplementation, and a ten-week crew won’t change that.
What happens when the crew leaves?
Every closed item stays closed only if somebody owns it, so each one is handed back with a named owner, a note on what changed and a test to run before the next release. The harder question is time. Does that owner have any? If not, the list starts growing again, which is why some clients finish with a direct hire.
Show Us What Lives Next to Your ERP
Most teams already keep a list of what’s broken, in a spreadsheet or somebody’s head. Messy is fine. Tell us which ERP you run, when it went live and the five items that annoy people most. We’ll tell you which trades it needs and roughly how long.
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