How to De-Risk a Large ERP Project: The Case for Independent Oversight

The slow accumulation of risks is often the true culprit behind failure—not a single catastrophic event. Our ERP project recovery team has seen a consistent pattern: risks emerge quietly in the background while teams stay focused on milestones.

If you have multi-site operations or multiple vendors involved, the degree of risk grows exponentially. When priorities shift, teams are stretched thin, and external partners pursue misaligned goals, the project suffers. But organizations only realize it when it’s too late.

This is where independent ERP oversight becomes a strategic advantage. A neutral, third-party advisor brings objectivity to decisions, visibility to execution gaps, and discipline to governance across workstreams.

In this post, we explore how organizations can de-risk ERP projects by establishing strong internal governance and relying on independent oversight.

ERP Risk Management Best Practices for Large Enterprises

1. Treat Oversight as a Standing Function—Not a Recovery Tool

• Rising Costs: Budgets expand due to scope changes, rework, or delays that could have been avoided with earlier intervention.

• Eroded Trust: Miscommunication between business units, IT, and vendors leads to finger-pointing and declining stakeholder confidence.

• Misaligned System Design: Key decisions made without broad input result in a system that does not reflect how the business truly operates.

In contrast, when oversight is embedded from the beginning, it becomes a guardrail instead of a rescue mission.

Independent oversight brings neutrality to every stage: selection, design, integration, and post-go-live optimization. More importantly, it gives executives a real-time view of what is happening—not just what vendors or internal reports claim is happening.

This is especially critical in multi-vendor ERP implementations, where vendors each operate under their own delivery models. An independent advisor acts as the connective tissue between partners, flagging misaligned roadmaps, surfacing integration friction, and ensuring business outcomes stay at the center.

Client Example

A large, multi-site marine manufacturing company engaged Panorama to provide independent oversight during its ERP selection and planning efforts. With multiple sites and several technology vendors involved, the organization needed a neutral advisor to ensure enterprise priorities guided every decision.

Our ERP selection consultants facilitated validated vendor deliverables against business objectives and established a unified risk register for executive review. By introducing this layer of accountability, the client was able to maintain alignment between its IT strategy and operational goals.

2. Pressure-Test Governance Across Business Units

A strong governance model starts with clarity: who owns decisions, how tradeoffs are escalated, and what success looks like at both the corporate and business-unit level. 

Beyond structure, governance must be continuously reinforced through:

• Cadence: Establish a regular meeting rhythm across all levels—steering committees, workstream leads, and vendor check-ins—to keep decision-making timely and consistent.

• Visibility: Ensure that project risks, milestones, and dependencies are clearly communicated to all stakeholders through dashboards, status reports, and executive briefings.

• Executive Sponsorship: Keep senior leaders actively engaged as visible champions who reinforce priorities and model accountability.

For example, in multi-site ERP implementations, regional operations may differ in regulatory requirements, data maturity, and legacy system dependencies. In these cases, a neutral third-party can review how governance adapts across regions to ensure consistent execution.

3. Avoid the Trap of Vendor-Defined Success

To close this gap, organizations need an oversight partner whose incentives are aligned with business outcomes. This partner should:

• Audit deliverables against original requirements

• Validate that integrations function across all vendors

• Flag potential misalignments between process design and real-world workflows

• Ensure data governance policies are implemented consistently

Independent oversight is especially important when organizations engage multiple vendors—each with their own timelines, KPIs, and assumptions. Without a central accountability mechanism, critical elements like process alignment, data integrity, and user adoption can fall through the cracks.

4. Build an Early Warning System for Scope Drift

Independent ERP consultants can help organizations set up scope monitoring frameworks that detect early signs of drift, such as:

• Requirements volatility across business units

• Implementation partners billing outside original parameters

• Customizations masking poor process alignment

• Delayed or under-resourced change management workstreams

Executives should demand monthly or quarterly scope audits from an independent party to evaluate where the scope is expanding and whether it is creating value.

5. Strengthen Cross-Site Alignment Before Go-Live

In multi-site ERP implementations, rollout schedules often prioritize corporate headquarters or the most mature location. However, templates developed during these initial phases may reflect only a narrow subset of business realities.

Independent advisors can validate whether process templates and data migration frameworks are scalable across all sites. They can also help facilitate site-readiness assessments that evaluate whether regional teams have the skills, data quality, and operational maturity to adopt the system successfully.

For global enterprises, the oversight role should also include ensuring that regulatory compliance, local data privacy, and system localization are embedded from the start.

6. Provide Real-Time Feedback to Executives

• Risks that internal teams may be hesitant to escalate

• Underreported resource constraints

• Gaps between change management strategy and execution

• Post-go-live adoption challenges

This transparency is often the difference between early course correction and last-minute recovery. It also keeps leadership teams engaged and accountable—ensuring informed decisions throughout every phase of the project.

Learn More About Managing Large ERP Projects

Large projects span complex systems and competing priorities, so risk mitigation in the form of independent ERP oversight is especially critical.  

At Panorama, our consultants operate without vendor affiliations or hidden incentives. We can ensure that your multi-vendor ERP implementation or multi-site rollout stays grounded in enterprise priorities. Contact our ERP consultants below to start reducing risk and protecting your investment.