IFS ERP: The Good, The Bad, and The Over Customized: Real-World Lessons, Hard Truths, and Human Stories from the ERP Front Lines

IFS ERP: The Good, The Bad, and The Over Customized: Real-World Lessons, Hard Truths, and Human Stories from the ERP Front Lines

IFS ERP: The Good, The Bad, and The Over Customized is a candid, humorous, and deeply human memoir of life inside real-world ERP implementations—told by a consultant who has spent decades in the trenches leading, rescuing, and living through IFS ERP projects. This book goes far beyond software features, project plans, and glossy success stories. Instead, it explores what actually happens between kickoff and go-live: the excitement, the missteps, the late nights, the heated meetings, the quiet victories, and the moments when teams pull together to make the impossible work. Through fictionalized but painfully familiar companies, characters, and scenarios, the book reveals the universal patterns that define ERP projects—regardless of industry or geography. Readers will follow a recurring cast of seasoned technical and functional experts as they navigate requirements that change weekly, designs that look perfect on paper but collapse in practice, data migrations that expose uncomfortable truths, training sessions that test patience and humor, and go-live weekends fueled by caffeine and determination. Each chapter blends storytelling with hard-earned lessons, offering practical insight into why ERP projects succeed, why they fail, and—most importantly—how people make the difference. While grounded in IFS ERP, the themes of this book are system-agnostic and timeless. It speaks to project managers, consultants, business leaders, IT professionals, and anyone who has ever wondered why large transformation initiatives are so challenging—and so personal. Along the way, it tackles topics rarely discussed openly: when to change consultants, how to recover from bad decisions, why governance matters after go-live, and how leadership, empathy, and trust shape outcomes more than any configuration setting ever could. Written with warmth, wit, and humility, IFS ERP: The Good, The Bad, and The Over Customized is both a field guide and a reflection. It honors the teams behind the process, the lessons learned through failure as much as success, and the idea that ERP projects are not just technical undertakings—they are shared human journeys. Whether you are about to start your first ERP implementation or are a veteran of many go-lives, this book will make you laugh, nod in recognition, and perhaps see your own ERP story a little differently.