ERP Rescue Consultant, New Zealand

How New Zealand projects get into difficulty

The New Zealand market has its own shape. Implementer firms are often small, some projects are delivered from Australia or offshore, and client teams rarely have spare people to give to an ERP project. Those conditions do not make failure likely, but they do reduce the margin for error. The patterns that tend to lead to a rescue include:

• One person at the implementer holds most of the project knowledge, and their departure leaves the rest of the team catching up.
• The project replaced Xero or MYOB plus several apps, but some of those apps were never properly connected to the new system.
• Payroll and leave data were treated as a simple integration and turned out to be anything but.
• Repeated data loads have left opening balances that still disagree with the old ledger.
• An Australian entity was added to scope late, bringing a second set of tax and payroll rules.
• The business went live before staff were ready, and work has drifted back to spreadsheets.

None of these is unusual on its own. When several appear together and the project has stopped making progress, an independent view is usually the fastest way to stop the drift. The failed ERP implementation page describes the problem side in more detail, and the ERP recovery page covers the general method.

Protecting GST, payday filing and the monthly close

Inland Revenue deadlines and pay days do not wait for a project review. So the first job is a set of stopgap arrangements, agreed with your accountant and payroll provider and recorded in a shared document anyone on the team can follow.

GST. If the new system's GST figures cannot yet be relied on, your accountant decides how the next return will be prepared and checked, for example by reconciling GST in the ledger to invoice and bill listings. If earlier returns may have been affected, your accountant decides whether anything needs correcting with Inland Revenue.

Payroll. Your payroll provider continues to pay staff and handle payday filing. My focus is the journal that comes back into the ERP, making sure it lands in the right accounts and that liabilities clear.

Invoicing and payments. Customer invoices, statements and supplier batches get the earliest checks, since a wrong invoice or a missed payment damages trust with customers and suppliers faster than any internal report.

The monthly close. A temporary close routine names each workaround and reconciliation, who does it and when it can be retired, so owners still get a usable monthly report.

This groundwork can feel like a delay, but it is what gives the team room to work on the project rather than spending every day on workarounds.

Triage and a shared set of facts

In a troubled project, owners, staff and the implementer usually each have their own version of events. All of them contain some truth. My job is to turn them into one account that everyone can accept, because without that, any plan for recovery will be argued over rather than followed.

I talk separately to the owners or directors, your internal project lead, finance, operations staff and the implementer's team. Then I test the system directly: a sale through to payment, a purchase through to supplier payment, a stock receipt and adjustment, a payroll journal and the month-end close. Data loads and connectors to remaining apps are checked alongside.

Every open item is placed in one of a few groups:

• stopping the business from operating properly;
• important, but able to follow a first stable release;
• no longer worth doing;
• disputed between you and the implementer.

Both you and the implementer see the same draft, worded without blame, before anything is decided. In a small market, where you may keep working with the same people, that neutral tone matters. Where an outside view is enough for the moment, ask for an independent ERP second opinion instead of a full rescue.

Contract review and the implementer relationship

A New Zealand ERP project may begin with a proposal and a fairly light agreement, followed by variations as scope changes. When something goes wrong, those documents are what both sides rely on. Legal advice is your lawyer's job. Mine is to lay out the facts so that advice can be quick and specific.

I prepare a record showing each piece of agreed work, what happened to it, which variations changed it and what was invoiced. Questions for your lawyer usually include how acceptance was meant to work, whether the work was quoted as a fixed price or charged by time, what the implementer assumed your team would provide, who owns custom work and documentation, and what help the implementer must provide if the arrangement ends.

Alongside the contract, the relationship itself needs attention. A reset session with the implementer agrees a shorter priority list, the people involved on both sides, how results will be tested and accepted, and how knowledge will be shared across their team so the project no longer depends on one person. If a different implementer is needed, the record and the triage list become their brief, and my ERP selection work in New Zealand describes how to compare candidates in a small market.

Finish, narrow, hand over or rebuild

With the business steady and the facts agreed, owners can choose a route based on evidence. For every route I note the conditions it needs, the main risks and the factors behind its cost.

• Finish with today's implementer on a reset footing, provided the software suits you and they can staff the remaining work.
• Narrow the first release to the core processes the business depends on, such as sales, purchasing, stock and finance, and add the rest later.
• Hand over to a different implementer if the software is right but the team behind it cannot finish the job.
• Rebuild on another platform only when testing shows the product cannot meet core needs. Going back to Xero or MYOB with a tidier set of apps is a legitimate option here, not a defeat.

If you want continuity, I remain the client-side lead through recovery, chairing check-ins, owning the issue log and holding the line on release criteria; otherwise you receive a written plan. Delivery is remote, with live sessions in your afternoon and recorded updates for the rest of the day; visits by arrangement. For a live system that works but disappoints, start with the New Zealand ERP audit. Other advisory services for Kiwi businesses are listed on the New Zealand ERP consultant page, with market notes on the NZ hub.