Somebody in your building runs a report every Friday afternoon, and nobody else knows how it works. An aviation software veteran described a version of it to me this summer: the ERP had been live for a while, and the week’s numbers still depended on one person pushing one button at the same time every week. If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably already typed “erp consultant” into Google and found a page full of job listings, salary charts, and firms that want to help you pick an ERP. You already picked one. That’s the problem with the search.

An ERP consultant helps a business choose, set up, or improve its ERP system, and after go-live the job shifts to configuring what was skipped, connecting the ERP to the quoting, CRM and accounting tools around it, and getting the team off the spreadsheets they kept. Three kinds of help can do that work: an independent consultant, the vendor partner who implemented the system, or a systems team. Which one fits depends less on skill than on who pays them and where their job stops.

I run Janaitis Business Systems, and we’re the third kind. I’m not a neutral party here. I’ll tell you where each of the other two is the better hire, because for some of you it will be. And I’ll tell you one more thing up front: we haven’t worked inside an ERP. Our work has been in the CRM, project, time-tracking and accounting systems around one, and we can connect to an ERP wherever it opens its data to us. If a consultant tells you they have done everything, ask them to name the systems.

Do you even have an ERP?

Plenty of small manufacturers don’t, and it’s worth asking before you hire anyone. Two of the shops I’ve spoken with recently run their work without a true ERP. One tracks projects in Monday.com and had been on NetSuite, which turned out to be more than the business needed, so he is moving to QuickBooks. Another keeps tracking in a handful of other tools. Neither is behind. They’re running the business with what fits.

If that’s you, the advice below about an “ERP consultant” doesn’t quite apply, but most of it still does. The question is the same one: who is going to make the systems you do have agree with each other, and who pays them. If you don’t run an ERP, you want a systems team, not an ERP consultant, and this page will help you see why.

What does an ERP consultant do after go-live?

After go-live, an ERP consultant’s job is to close the distance between what the system can do and what your team does with it every week. Before go-live, the work is selection and implementation: picking the software, mapping your processes, migrating data, training people, and flipping the switch. After go-live, the work is smaller and messier. Some of it is configuration that got cut when the schedule slipped. Some of it is the systems that sit next to the ERP and still don’t talk to it. And a lot of it is the spreadsheets.

When I find a spreadsheet running next to an ERP, it’s usually telling me one of two things. Either the ERP isn’t configured to do something it can do, or the question the spreadsheet answers spans two systems that aren’t connected. We wrote up both cases, and a ten-minute test you can run on your own reports, in We Bought the ERP. The Spreadsheets Never Left. The short version is that your people built the spreadsheet because it was the fastest way to answer a question the system couldn’t answer yet. It marks the spot where the software stopped.

That’s why the after-go-live job looks different from the implementation job. It starts with your records, your definitions and your handoffs, and the software comes second. On our side we work it in a fixed order, the one on our nine-constraint map: get the data recorded right, then get it moving between systems without a person carrying it, then get somebody deciding from it on a schedule. The most common thing I find binding a shop after go-live is a dead handoff, where someone retypes the same order into the quoting tool, the ERP and the accounting system. It’s also the one with the clearest fix.

A quick test tells you whether you need after-go-live help at all. Ask whoever brings the numbers to your weekly meeting where they come from and how long they take. If you hear “export,” “pull,” or “I drop it into my sheet,” a person is producing that number, and the system isn’t.

Which kind of ERP consultant should you hire?

Hire the kind of help whose business model matches the question you’re asking.

  • If the question is which software to buy, hire an independent consultant. They’re paid by you alone, and selection is where neutrality matters most.
  • If it’s how to use a feature of the software you bought, call the partner who implemented it. They know that one product deeper than anyone.
  • If it’s why your numbers still don’t agree a year after go-live, hire someone whose job starts where the implementation ended: a systems team that works across the ERP and the tools around it.
  • If you want senior judgment on the technology plan, a fractional CIO.
  • If you have enough work for a full-time seat, a systems analyst.

Every one of those is somebody’s right answer. A shop that’s twelve months from replacing a twenty-year-old ERP needs the independent consultant, and I’d tell you so on a call. A shop whose ERP is fine but whose partner never set up the job-costing module should probably call the partner back before calling anyone else.

Independent ERP consultant or vendor partner: who pays them?

An independent ERP consultant is paid only by you, while a vendor partner (often called a VAR, for value-added reseller) is paid by you and, in many cases, by the software vendor whose product it sells. Partners do good work, and the payment split is still worth knowing before you take advice from anyone.

ERP Research, which runs a directory of ERP consultants, puts the line in one sentence: an independent consultant holds “no reseller agreement with any vendor, so their fee is their only revenue from the engagement.” The same page names the most common red flag in the market as “a reseller presenting itself as an independent adviser.” Ultra Consultants, one of the firms that ranks for this search, describes its approach as vendor-neutral, and neutrality matters most at selection, when the decision is which product to buy.

Vendor partners earn their place too. A good partner knows one ERP deeper than any independent will, has certified people on staff, can get answers from the vendor faster, and handles the upgrades. If your problem lives inside the ERP, such as a module that was never switched on, a workflow nobody configured, or an upgrade that broke a report, the partner is often the fastest fix, and calling them back is usually the right first move.

Where it gets harder after go-live is the stuff outside the ERP. Your quoting tool, your CRM and your accounting package each belong to a different vendor, and a partner certified in one ERP has no special reason to care how your CRM records reach it. So nobody’s job covers the gap between the systems, and the retyping happens in that gap.

We handle the money question with the one claim on this page you can check yourself. We don’t sell or resell software, and if a vendor ever offers us a commission for recommending them, it comes to you as a credit on your invoice. You’d see it on the bill.

Should you hire a fractional CIO or a systems analyst instead?

Hire a systems analyst if you have the work to fill a full-time seat and can find the person; hire a fractional CIO if what’s missing is senior technology judgment and you already have someone to do the build. Both are real options, and both solve a different problem than an ERP consultant does.

A full-time systems analyst gives you someone in the building every day who knows every quirk of your systems. That’s worth a lot. On cost, Robert Half’s current salary guide puts a business systems analyst at roughly $71,000 to $100,000 and a senior one at $95,000 to $137,000, before benefits, payroll tax or the time it takes to recruit. The harder part, from what I hear from manufacturers and the people who advise them, is filling the seat at all at a $2M to $20M shop, and then what happens when that one person is out for two weeks or takes another job. A hire can turn into the thing my map calls “one person is the system,” where the work only happens because of who’s doing it.

A fractional CIO is usually a senior person on a monthly retainer for part of their week. They’re good at the plan: which systems to keep, which vendors to manage harder, what to budget for next year. Many of them don’t build the integrations or rewrite the reports themselves, and that’s fine if you have someone who will. Ask before you sign.

The word “fractional” gets used a lot, and owners reach for it because they know they can’t hire the whole role. That’s the gap we’re built for: the function a business systems analyst would cover, run by a small team that writes down how everything works as it goes, so it doesn’t walk out the door with one person. There are three of us, and we all work across your whole stack. The best way to picture it is a small special-operations team coming in to fix your hardest problems, as opposed to one person you hope never gets sick.

Where does your MEP center fit?

Your state’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership center is usually the first call for an operations assessment, and it often refers the implementation work out to private firms. If you’re a small manufacturer and haven’t talked to yours, it’s worth doing before you hire anyone.

The MEP National Network, run with NIST, describes itself as “a public-private partnership” helping “small and medium-sized manufacturers grow, make operational improvements, and reduce risk,” with nearly 1,400 advisors at more than 450 service locations across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. In Maryland, where I work, Maryland MEP works with 500-plus manufacturers a year. Their assessments cover operations, supply chain, the floor and cyber security.

So an MEP center and a firm like ours usually sit at two ends of the same path: they’re often the first step, and the referral comes after. If your MEP advisor has already told you the office side needs work, that’s a good moment to call.

What does an ERP consultant cost?

Independent and boutique ERP consultants typically charge $150 to $350 an hour, according to ERP Research’s directory, with full implementation projects running from about $50,000 to several million dollars. Those are selection and implementation numbers. After-go-live work is usually smaller and more open-ended. That makes it hard to budget, because an hourly block runs out right when the work gets interesting.

Here is how the options compare on cost, using public figures where they exist and our published prices for ours:

  • Independent or boutique consultant: $150 to $350 an hour.
  • Full-time business systems analyst: about $71,000 to $137,000 a year in salary depending on seniority, before benefits and recruiting.
  • Vendor partner: hourly or project rates that vary by vendor, plus your license and renewal fees.
  • Janaitis Business Systems: a $1,200 systems audit, a $9,000 fixed-scope 90-day build, or a flat $4,250 to $8,150 a month. The full $1,200 comes off the build if you go ahead.

We publish ours because you’d ask anyway. The monthly fee is flat, so we never earn more by making you spend more, and it’s never a percentage of your software bill. What changes between tiers is how many fixes we have going at once: one, two or three. Everything’s on our pricing page.

The thing to compare across the list is what you’re paying for. An hourly consultant is paid for time, so a slow job costs you more. A hire is paid for presence. We’re paid for pace, so a fix that drags is a week we carry, and you see what cleared at every quarterly review before you decide whether to keep going.

If you’re reading this with a specific report in mind, the one that takes someone a day to build, book a free 25-minute call. It’s five questions about how your systems work today, and you’ll leave knowing what I think is binding and what I’d fix first.

What should you ask an ERP consultant before you hire them?

Ask who pays them besides you, which systems they’ve worked in, what they’ll refuse to do, and what they’ll measure at the end. Those four answers tell you more than any portfolio.

  1. Who pays you besides me? How a firm gets paid decides what it recommends. A partner earning on your license renewal isn’t dishonest, but you should know it’s there.
  2. Which ERPs, and which of the systems around it, have you worked inside? Get names. A consultant who has only worked in one ERP will be great in that one. Ours: QuickBooks, HubSpot, Pipedrive, GoHighLevel, Zapier and Make, plus the project, time-tracking and accounting tools around them. No ERP yet, and we say so.
  3. What won’t you do? Firms that publish their refusals are rare. When I looked across roughly eighty firms in this space, about six said what they won’t do anywhere public. Ours are on our about page: we don’t touch the machines, we don’t rip out what you’re running, we don’t sell software, we don’t run AI pilots, and we don’t do servers or networks.
  4. What will you measure on day one and again at the end? If the answer is “you’ll feel the difference,” keep asking.
  5. Who does the work after the sales call? Ask for the name of the person who will be inside your systems.
  6. What happens to the documentation when you leave? Everything built in your systems should be written down in a place you own.

What does a finished after-go-live engagement look like?

At the end of a 90-day systems build, a shop has the most pressing problem it hired us for fixed, a scorecard that pulls from several systems on its own, and a ranked list of what to fix next. That’s the shape every build follows.

Month one is access and interviews. We get read access to every system the build touches (read before write, always) and talk to the people who use the systems, along with the people who bought them. The person who signed the contract usually has a slightly different picture of how a tool gets used than the person in it every day, and nobody writes the drift down. Around week four or five we put a draft of our findings in front of your key people and ask them to poke holes in it. Month two is the connection work. Month three is finishing the build, a second, deeper set of findings, and training your team to read what’s now in front of them.

The change gets measured on a fixed instrument. On day one we write down the six questions you most need answered about your own business, whether you can answer each one today, and how long it takes. On day 90 we ask the same six questions and write the answers next to the originals. The guarantee is on the build: by day 90 the systems and numbers the plan named are connected, they reconcile, and the report ships, or we keep working at no additional cost.

The longest-running example we can show you is our own company. We ran this same connected layer inside our own business before we sold it to anybody else, and we log every change to it: more than 1,400 changes between March and September 2026. It connects the CRM where we sell, the QuickBooks where we invoice, the ClickUp where we run projects and the Harvest where we track time.

Do aviation and aerospace manufacturers need a different kind of ERP consultant?

Aviation and aerospace manufacturers need the same after-go-live work as any small manufacturer, held to the standard they already apply to their parts. Every part you ship can be traced back to the day it was made. Your quotes, orders and margins usually can’t, and that gap reads stranger in a business built on traceability.

The segments we’re built for are aftermarket parts, consumables and expendables, avionics and instrument products, and ground support equipment: repeat-purchase businesses with real vendor choice and a technical salesperson on every deal. We’re not the right call for design-in component supply on new aircraft programs, where certification and multi-year cycles remove most of what we’d be fixing. If you run an MRO or a repair station, you’re not who we sell to, though you probably know every manufacturer whose parts you install. More on our aviation and aerospace manufacturing page.

When is a systems team the wrong hire?

A systems team is the wrong hire if you need a new ERP chosen and installed by next quarter, or if you want the dashboard without the work of agreeing what the numbers mean. Both are real needs, and for both somebody else is better.

If you’re replacing your ERP, hire an independent selection consultant, and then the implementation partner for the product you pick. We’ll happily tell you who to call. If you want somebody to own the numbers so you don’t have to look at them, we’re not a fit for that either. The work only sticks when someone in your building decides from it on a schedule.

We’re built for founder-led manufacturers running three to eight business systems, with nobody in-house who can connect them, agree the rules, or read what comes out. Usually somebody’s retyping records between systems every week, and a question about last quarter takes days to answer. If you got this far and recognized your Friday report, you’re doing the right thing by asking these questions before you hire anyone. You’ll find the bigger picture of why the systems drift apart in our piece on data silos in a small manufacturer, and how we work the whole map on the How We Work page.

When you want a second opinion on your own systems, book a 25-minute call. Five questions, nothing to prepare, and if you’d be better off spending the money with your partner or an independent consultant, I’ll tell you that too.