Member-only story
One of the biggest debates we had early on was whether to buy an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to scale our manufacturing. I’ll never forget it because it set off a chain of events that changed our company forever.
Here’s the story…
Two of my cofounders, “Ken” and “Randy”, came into my office about three months after we got funded. They had an urgent topic they wanted to discuss with me.
“We need to get an ERP system,” Randy said. “We’ve got products coming out in six months and we need to be prepared to scale.”
An ERP system was something I really didn’t want to spend money on, but I told Ken and Randy to research our options. Randy, who ran operations, said he would get back to me in two weeks.
Two weeks later, on queue, Randy and Ken scheduled a meeting to present their findings to me. The presentation was a classic “Rabbit out of the hat” pitch.
Randy went through his pitch:
- Oracle was deemed “too expensive”, and…
- Running and scaling the company’s manufacturing using a combination of QuickBooks and Excel (our default solution) was deemed “too buggy”, but…
- With no other options left (the rabbit out of the hat) Company X had a…
