Before You Replace Lawson V10, Part 2: What to Actually Look at When Vetting Systems

In Part 1 of this series, I made the case that most V10 customers in the market for a new ERP are solving the wrong problem, and that the upgrade path to CloudSuite FSM is meaningfully different from a net new implementation with a different vendor. Some organizations are still going to go to market regardless, because the 2030 deadline has people anxious and a lot of CIOs feel like they owe their boards a thorough evaluation before they commit to any direction. Fair enough.

If you’re going to do it, do it well. Here is what actually matters during an ERP evaluation, and here is what you should refuse to be dazzled by.

Look at the Functionality You Actually Use

The pretty dashboards in a vendor demo exist to make a fifteen minute pitch land. They are the easiest thing to build, and they tell you almost nothing about whether the system can actually run your business. Push past the demo and ask how the system handles the work you do every day in the modules you depend on most. If you have a sophisticated inventory operation, ask the inventory questions. If your financial close is complex, ask the close questions. If your procurement team lives and dies by three way matching, walk through every step of how that works in the new system using your own data and your own processes.

The functionality you actually use is the only functionality worth evaluating. Anything else is theater.

Look at How the System Is Packaged and What It Forces You to Bolt On

Modular pricing looks attractive at first glance. Then you realize the modules you assumed were included are not actually part of the base package, and by year three the bill has crept up significantly as you have added what you actually need. Per seat licensing looks fine when you’re pricing it for the finance team, until the math changes the moment you want to roll reporting out to operations and find that the cost makes it impossible. Every bolt-on the core system can’t handle on its own becomes another vendor relationship to manage, another integration to maintain, and another point of failure when something breaks.

The way a system is packaged tells you a lot about how the vendor thinks about your long term relationship with them. Take the time to understand the full cost of running the system five and ten years out, because the year-one quote on the page in front of you is only the starting number. The real cost shows up over the life of the contract.

Never Eliminate the Incumbent

The most common mistake I see is organizations that have already made the emotional decision to replace before the formal comparison ever starts, and the vetting becomes a wrapper of due diligence around a conclusion they reached months ago. If you’re going to do the evaluation, do it honestly, and that means giving the next version of your current system a real seat at the table.

The incumbent has advantages no other vendor can offer. Your team already knows the platform, your data is already structured around it, your integrations already work with it, and your training material is already written for it. None of that is a small thing. Strip those advantages out of the comparison and you are not really comparing systems at all. You are comparing the demo theater of one vendor against the actual lived experience of another.

Optimize Now, Regardless of Where You Land

Whatever direction you choose, the work to do today is the same. Start by cleaning up your data, because the organizations that walk into any system change with clean data have a dramatically faster and cheaper experience than the ones that show up with twenty years of accumulated noise to untangle. Then organize your reporting and stop defaulting to Excel for everything, because the Excel habit is a sign that your current system’s reporting capability has been underused and the habit will follow you into the new system unless you break it first. Finally, audit what is actually being used in your current platform, because most V10 deployments have functionality nobody knows is there and you are paying for a lot more system than you are using.

The optimization work pays off whether you upgrade, replace, or stay put. There is no version of the next four years where investing in your current platform is the wrong move.

Coming Next

Part 1 was for customers who like Lawson but feel pressured to look elsewhere. Part 2 was for customers who are going to vet other systems anyway. Part 3 is aimed at a different group entirely, the customers who didn’t enjoy their V10 experience and have already decided CloudSuite is more of the same. That assumption is usually wrong, and the reasons why are worth a conversation of their own.