Companies are spending €1M on the wrong ERP. We built the tool that prevents it
Let me start with a stat that genuinely bothered me when I first came across it: somewhere between 55 and 75 percent of ERP implementations fail to meet expectations.
On a decision that costs between €200k and €1.5 million and ties a company to a system for the next decade, that is a staggering number. And what bothered me even more was figuring out where the failure actually starts. Not during implementation. Not during go-live. During selection. Companies are picking the wrong system from the beginning, and then spending years trying to make it work anyway.
I kept seeing this pattern over and over in conversations with founders and ops leads and CTOs across the DACH region. And every time I looked at what tools they had available to help them make this decision, I found the same thing: vendor-funded comparison portals ranking systems based on ad spend, "independent" consultants quietly on vendor payrolls, and feature tables with 500+ checkboxes that tell you absolutely nothing useful. The resources were outdated, biased, and honestly kind of embarrassing for an industry this size.
So I built something about it. Together with the team at ProtoBites, we launched ERP Pilot.
The core idea came from watching how good ERP consultants actually work. They do not start by comparing features. They start by eliminating vendors. There are a small number of technical requirements that, if a system cannot meet them, make everything else irrelevant. We call these knockout criteria.
One concrete example: if your company needs parallel ledgers for multi-GAAP reporting, say HGB plus IFRS plus US-GAAP, then Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, and Odoo are gone immediately. Three of the six major mid-market ERP systems eliminated before a single demo is booked. That is genuinely useful signal, and it is the kind of thing that should take minutes to figure out, not months.
ERP Pilot covers the six systems most relevant to DACH mid-market companies: SAP S/4HANA, Dynamics 365, Oracle Cloud ERP, NetSuite, Odoo Enterprise, and SAP Business One. You answer 14 questions, the algorithm runs your answers against knockout criteria for each system, and you get a ranked recommendation with clear reasoning in about 10 minutes. Free, no vendor relationships, no referral fees, no follow-up sales call unless you actually want one.
There is also an optional €99 report if you want to go deeper with TCO projections and a negotiation guide, but the core tool is free and always will be.
The timing for this also felt right to me. SAP ends mainstream ECC maintenance in 2027 and thousands of mid-market companies are going to default to S/4HANA without a real evaluation simply because the selection process feels too hard. That is exactly the kind of avoidable mistake I wanted to build against.
Curious if anyone here has been through an ERP selection from either side, as a founder, CTO, or consultant. What did you wish you had?
Would genuinely love the feedback.
Try it here: erp-pilot.com
