The cheapest quote you receive for a Business Central implementation will not produce the cheapest implementation you get. The gap between what appears on a proposal and what the project actually costs is where ERP projects come undone, and where finance directors end up explaining to the board why they need to do it again. Across numerous Business Central implementations in the UK, Ireland, and internationally, the pattern TEKenable sees is consistent: organisations that regret their ERP implementation rarely regret the software. They regret the implementation partner, the scope they agreed to, or both.
A cheap ERP implementation almost always costs more than a properly scoped one. The quoted price reflects what the partner will do. It rarely reflects what the implementation actually requires. Four things are compressed in every low-cost quote: discovery, data preparation, training, and change management. Cutting any one of them does not eliminate the cost. It defers it. And deferred costs arrive later at a higher rate.
What “Cheap” Actually Means on a Proposal
A low implementation quote typically gets there one of two ways. The partner has scoped less work. Or they have priced themselves at a rate that makes their margin dependent on the project running exactly as proposed, which no implementation project ever does.
Either way, the proposal looks attractive at the point of decision. The problems arrive later: when scope expands, when the data turns out to be worse than expected, when users do not adopt the system, when the initial configuration does not match how the business actually operates.
This is not a failure unique to any particular partner. It is a structural feature of how ERP projects are priced. A fixed-price quote requires assumptions. When those assumptions turn out to be wrong, and they usually are to some degree, the cost lands somewhere. Either the partner absorbs it (which is unsustainable) or the client pays through change orders, extended timelines, or a system that simply does not do what was promised.
The Four Deferred Costs
Across the implementations TEKenable has delivered, the same four areas get compressed when an implementation is priced cheaply. They are not optional extras. They are the work that makes the rest of the project hold together.
Discovery
A properly scoped discovery phase, typically two to four weeks of structured analysis before any configuration begins, is where requirements get documented, assumptions get tested, and the gap between what the client thinks they need and what will actually work gets surfaced. Skip it, and those gaps surface mid-project. Fixing them at that stage costs significantly more in consultant hours than addressing them before configuration started.
Data preparation
ERP data migration is consistently underestimated. Dirty customer records, outdated item masters, inconsistent historical transactions: these are flagged during migration, require multiple rounds of rework, and add unplanned hours to a project. According to Panorama Consulting’s 2026 ERP Report, poor data migration drives 38% of ERP implementation failures. Cleaning data before a project starts is unglamorous work. Cleaning it during a project is expensive work, and it delays go-live.
Training
Not generic platform training, but role-specific, process-specific training that maps to how the business operates after go-live. When training is compressed, the result is not just a slow adoption curve. It is a productivity drop that can last months, compounded by support tickets, workarounds, and data quality issues that grow the longer they run. Research on digital transformation consistently identifies poor user adoption, not the technology, as the primary reason implementations fail to deliver value.
Change management
The organisational disruption that comes with a new ERP is routinely underestimated. Finance teams lose their manual workarounds. Operations teams have to learn new approval flows. Department heads who were not consulted in the scoping phase become blockers at go-live. None of this is a surprise. It is entirely predictable. A properly scoped implementation accounts for it from the start. A cheap one assumes it will not happen.
The Re-Implementation Penalty
The most expensive ERP implementation is the second one.
When the first implementation fails to deliver a usable system, organisations face a choice: patch it indefinitely, or re-implement. Patching costs accumulate over time: customisations built to work around a badly configured core, consultants brought in to fix specific problems, integrations written to compensate for missing functionality. Re-implementing means paying for discovery, data migration, training, and configuration a second time, on top of whatever was spent the first time.
ERP recovery projects typically cost at or above 100% of the original implementation budget. They take six to twelve months. And they carry a cost that rarely appears on a balance sheet: the opportunity cost of a business running on a system that does not work properly, and the credibility damage of a failed technology project inside the organisation.
What the Numbers Say
The data on ERP implementation outcomes is consistent across sources, and consistently sobering. Panorama Consulting’s 2026 ERP Report puts the industry-wide rate of implementations that fail to meet their original objectives at 68%. Average budget overruns run at 189% of the original estimate. Only 32% of implementations are completed on time. Nearly half of organisations experience operational disruption post-go-live.
These are not outlier numbers. They represent the average experience across all ERP implementations, at all price points. Cheap implementations, by definition, cut the pre-implementation work that reduces the probability of joining those statistics. The top three causes of failure are precisely the areas that disappear first when a quote comes in unusually low:
Inadequate change management
The organisational side of the project, treated as optional when the budget is tight.
Poor data migration
Data quality issues surfacing mid-project instead of being addressed before it starts.
Inexperienced implementation teams
Lower day rates often reflect less experienced consultants running the project.
Panorama also notes that the typical ratio of implementation services to software cost is £3 to £5 in services for every £1 in licensing. A proposal that sits well below this ratio is compressing scope, not delivering better value.
Before you sign any ERP proposal: does the quoted scope include a dedicated discovery phase, data preparation support, role-specific training, and a change management plan? If any of those are missing, ask where those costs go, because they do not go away.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Implementation Is What You Will Live With
TEKenable holds Business Central Advanced Specialisation from Microsoft, independently verified, and has delivered numerous Business Central implementations across the UK, Ireland, and internationally, all in-house, with no subcontracting of core delivery. In our experience, clients remember what their system does every day, not what they paid for it at the start. A properly scoped implementation is not an upsell. It is what makes the software worth buying.
Sources
- Panorama Consulting 2026 ERP Report, summary via Godlan (primary source behind registration wall): 68% failure rate, 189% average budget overrun, 32% completed on time, root cause breakdown
- Panorama Consulting Group, 2026 ERP Report (primary, registration required)
