As a C-suite executive, startup founder, or corporate manager, you are likely familiar with the inherent complexities of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects. Historically, these initiatives have been a source of significant challenges, frequently failing to deliver on their promises despite a wealth of available knowledge on implementation. You may have observed a critical disconnect between theoretical advice and the practical outcomes of ERP projects in your organization, often resulting in budget overruns, missed deadlines, or extensive post-implementation fixes. This pervasive “normalized failure” of ERP projects is precisely what motivated Kati Hvidtfeldt, Chief Operating Officer & Partner at HandsFree ERP, to bridge the gap between theoretical guidance and actionable strategies, aiming to dramatically improve your success rates.

The HandsFree ERP Vision: A New Approach to Implementation for You

HandsFree ERP was founded with a clear vision: to transform your ERP implementation experience by providing a structured framework that significantly enhances project success. The aim is to move beyond generic advice, such as simply “picking the right software” or “building a great team,” and instead offer tactical, usable tips derived from decades of experience in rescuing ERP projects. This foundational vision has evolved into a sophisticated, three-pronged approach designed specifically to benefit your organization:

• Cultural Alignment: This ensures your company’s culture views ERP as a natural evolution of business growth, fostering automatic buy-in from your stakeholders. This proactive approach significantly reduces the need for extensive change management later in your project lifecycle.
• Pre-ERP Projects: This involves identifying and addressing critical business processes and potential “landmines” (e.g., redesigning your chart of accounts) before your ERP implementation even begins. This crucial step dramatically reduces stress and improves overall outcomes for your team.
• Practical Implementation Tips: HandsFree ERP provides a robust set of actionable strategies to optimize your traditional ERP implementation process, guiding you through each stage with clarity.

This comprehensive framework empowers your organization to improve ERP success regardless of your starting point, with a steadfast focus on practical guidance and real-world applicability to ensure superior customer experiences and operational efficiency within your business.

HandsFree ERP’s Specialized Offerings: Your Four Pillars of ERP Transformation

HandsFree ERP’s core services are dedicated to providing practical consulting, pre-ERP process optimization, cultural alignment, and customized implementation strategies to improve your ERP project success. Over the years, these services have evolved from a focus on practical implementation tips to a comprehensive, three-pronged framework addressing cultural readiness, preparatory projects, and optimized execution. This evolution reflects HandsFree ERP’s commitment to continuous learning, collaboration with experts, and adapting to client needs to deliver superior outcomes in a historically challenging field for your benefit.

At HandsFree ERP, core services are meticulously structured into four pivotal pillars, each designed to guide your organization toward seamless and successful ERP transformations:

1. Foundational and Educational Excellence: The ERP Success Framework serves as a beacon, illuminating a clear path to ERP triumph by proactively mitigating risks and maximizing return on investment for your organization. HandsFree ERP is launching a forthcoming book, tentatively titled ERP On the Brink: From Chaos to Strategic Victory, which offers visionary guidance specifically for you as a CEO or C-suite leader. Complementing this, the ERP Success Academy delivers a dynamic six-module, TED Talk-style educational platform tailored for your ERP project teams. This platform empowers your organization to become discerning ERP buyers, equipped to sidestep costly pitfalls. Additionally, the company provides bespoke one-on-one consulting and transformative workshops to foster deep understanding and strategic alignment within your team.
2. Pre-ERP Strategic Initiatives: Your success in ERP projects hinges critically on robust preparation. HandsFree ERP’s Pre-ERP services focus on essential projects that must be addressed before you embark on an ERP implementation—akin to installing critical infrastructure before constructing a building. For instance, they offer specialized Data Quality and Migration Assessments, alongside comprehensive data migration projects, addressing an often-overlooked yet critical component of your ERP success. Similarly, their Financial Design and Planning services include targeted assessments and workshops to ensure a solid foundation, enabling your organization to approach ERP projects with confidence and clarity.
3. Comprehensive ERP Requirements and Needs Assessment: HandsFree ERP revolutionizes the requirements-gathering process with innovative, unbiased tools for ERP. Their modern approach to fit/gap analysis transforms your user experience, delivering results in at least 60% less time than traditional methods. This process yields a genuine rough-order-of-magnitude estimate for your project, free from the biases of vendors or partners prioritizing their own interests. This methodology ensures alignment with your business’s true needs, fostering clarity and cost efficiency.

4. Expert Solution Selection Advisory: Selecting the optimal ERP solution demands precision and insight. HandsFree ERP’s advisory services provide end-to-end project management for both product and partner selection. They meticulously review proposals to uncover potential risks, navigate past superficial distractions, and focus on solutions that authentically align with your business objectives. By identifying hidden “landmines” and guiding you through the selection process, they ensure a strategic match that drives long-term success for your enterprise.

Overcoming Obstacles and Driving Your Organization’s Growth

In the early stages, HandsFree ERP engaged with ERP selling and implementation partners. However, Kati and team quickly recognized that their vision and values often conflicted with those of these partners. The partners’ business models, frequently reliant on selling service projects and hours, often introduced bias into their recommendations. Furthermore, because these partners typically represented a single ERP product, you, as the customer, did not receive a truly unbiased requirements and needs assessment, a thorough fit-gap analysis, or an accurate rough order of magnitude estimate for your project.

HandsFree ERP has since forged strategic partnerships built on providing unbiased, honest, and truthful assessments and guidance. This approach creates a “win-win-win” scenario, fostering long-term relationships through trust and well-managed expectations for your organization.

A pivotal moment that triggered her growth was the realization that their one-on-one advising and consulting services provided immense value to their customers. This led to the strategic decision to “bottle” this valuable advice in a more scalable manner. HandsFree ERP’s current offerings, including an upcoming book, are designed to reach a broader audience of companies and individuals like yourself. The overarching mission is to cultivate a large pool of well-educated ERP buyers, thereby reducing unnecessary burnout and fear among C-suite executives and project teams, and ultimately, “making ERP great again” for your business.

The Foundation of Your Success: Unbiased Expertise and Empowerment

HandsFree ERP has sustained its distinct, independent voice through an unwavering commitment to its mission and values. The company’s central focus is on empowering organizations like yours to become discerning ERP buyers, providing practical strategies and tools to navigate ERP projects with confidence and minimal stress. This mission permeates every aspect of their work and is fundamental to maintaining their independence, directly benefiting you.

Unlike firms incentivized by the sale of specific ERP products or implementation services, HandsFree ERP prides itself on delivering unbiased, client-side advisory services. By remaining free from vendor affiliations, Kati and her team uphold their role as a trusted advisor, offering objective guidance meticulously tailored to your unique needs.

To ensure the long-term sustainability of this identity, the team is dedicated to cultivating a new generation of advisors. The company’s philosophy, centered on People, Processes, and Tools for Better ERP Success, underpins all operations and reinforces its independent voice, enabling the delivery of transformative outcomes in a challenging industry for your benefit.

Critical Challenges and Strategic Solutions for You as an ERP Leader

Kati highlights a fundamental challenge for leaders today: often, the problem starts with “not knowing what you don’t know”, or trusting biased “guidance” driven by ulterior motives, leading to over-promised outcomes. These “landmines” are comprehensively detailed in their forthcoming book, which offers a “VERY clear blueprint” for navigation. Kati emphasizes the paradox that while you would never build a house without detailed blueprints, this is often the case with ERP projects in many organizations. Strategies she recommends for C-suite executives include:

• CEO as Project Champion: As the CEO, in collaboration with the rest of your C-suite, you must champion the ERP project. Your active involvement is critical.
• Controlling the Demo Process: Leaders like you need to actively control the demonstration process. Don’t let vendors dictate the narrative; focus on your specific needs.
• Independent Advisory: Hiring independent advisors and third-party experts can help you vet vendors, hold them and your C-suite accountable, and facilitate negotiations focused on outcomes rather than just features.

Another prevalent challenge one might face is the severe underestimation of ERP project scope and complexity. You might be led to believe projects will take 12 months and cost $3 million, operating as “plug-and-play” solutions. In reality, such projects typically extend to 18–24 months and often double the cost. Kati advises obtaining independent scoping and not relying solely on the software vendor’s timeline. Furthermore, budgeting 15–20% for internal alignment, training, and process reengineering is crucial for effective change management within your organization. You should also anticipate that your internal teams will be exhausted and plan for additional support to address potential capacity and capability gaps.

As a leader, you may also face poor adoption, where your employees reject the new system, cling to old spreadsheets, or find workarounds for new processes. HandsFree ERP addresses this through its three-legged framework for successful ERP projects. The elements of culture, change management (including a clear mission), and pre-ERP projects are deemed crucial before you even embark on the ERP project itself.

Kati uses powerful analogies: “Would you build a house without blueprints? Would a boxing champion train and fight without a trainer and coach? Would pilots land the plane without flight control tower?”. These analogies underscore the critical importance of recognizing when support and help are needed to effectively “fly” and “land” your ERP project. Further strategies for navigating ERP project challenges are detailed in their book and the ERP Success Academy course, designed with your needs in mind.

Technological Innovation and Industry Disruption

HandsFree ERP’s assessment tools dramatically reduce the time you and your team spend on requirements gathering while providing an accuracy that would be unattainable through months of detailed engagements with a vendor. On average, customers gain a comprehensive understanding of their data migration efforts or ERP requirements and fit-gap within two weeks using these tools, instead of months of engagements with junior consultants and brewing many pots of coffee.

Furthermore, the ERP Success Academy offers 6 modules with over 30 approximately 15-minute lessons, providing practical advice that serves as a much-needed blueprint for your ERP projects, helping you navigate and avoid typical “landmines”. This self-serve, on-demand training does not exist in the market beyond what HandsFree ERP offers, making it a unique resource for you.

HandsFree ERP is fundamentally disrupting the traditional ERP industry. The typical or traditional methods, such as relying solely on RFPs, or leaving critical components out of the ERP project, often make it impossible for your projects to stay on time, within budget, and within scope. This is precisely why so many ERP projects are perceived as total failures, and why no one ever says, “Oh yeah, I want to run an ERP project”.

HandsFree ERP believes that you can succeed and even make the project motivating. As articulated in their new book, ERP on the Brink; from Chaos to a Strategic Win, it is essential to “flip the script”. This means starting with strategy and mission, cultivating the right culture, and undertaking ERP pre-projects before you initiate the ERP project itself. HandsFree ERP offers a unique blueprint and framework that is vastly different from a traditional ERP project plan, designed to ensure your success.

Sustaining Innovation and Market Adaptability

HandsFree ERP maintains its innovative and competitive edge by intentionally pursuing strategies opposite to what the ERP industry has normalized. While others push a software-first approach and cookie-cutter implementations, HandsFree ERP focuses on people, process, and strategic readiness, recognizing these as the primary points of failure in most ERP projects you might encounter. Their innovation stems from deeply listening to what customers genuinely need: honest guidance, independent validation, and practical tools.

This client-centric philosophy has led to the development of key offerings designed to empower you:

• The ERP Success Academy: A first-of-its-kind, on-demand training platform that provides your project teams with strategic clarity and actionable advice in digestible, 15-minute modules.
• Modern Assessment Tools: These tools enable your organization to complete complex ERP and data migration planning in weeks, rather than months, with significantly greater accuracy than traditional consultant-led efforts.
• Pre-ERP Services: A major innovation involves treating key foundational work (such as financial design and data preparation) as standalone projects before software selection even begins. This proactive approach dramatically increases your project readiness and success.

HandsFree ERP also demonstrates constant adaptability by remaining vendor-agnostic. Because the company is not tied to selling specific software or implementation services, it can pivot quickly and focus entirely on what is best for its clients, even as technology and vendor landscapes shift, ensuring you always receive the most relevant advice.

Finally, their upcoming book, ERP on the Brink, reflects their belief in transparency and disruption. It captures real stories, hard truths, and provides the blueprint for “flipping the script” on ERP failure. In a market often characterized by complexity and noise, HandsFree ERP’s strategy is clear: tell the truth, empower you, the client, and continue building the tools and frameworks you actually need to succeed.

A Distinctive Edge and Industry Recognition for Kati’s Work

HandsFree ERP differentiates itself from other ERP consulting firms through its practical, actionable guidance, a unique three-legged framework that integrates cultural alignment, pre-ERP projects, and optimized implementation, and a proactive approach to identifying and mitigating project “landmines”. Its emphasis on fostering a collaborative culture that aims to eliminate the need for extensive change management and its systematic handling of pre-ERP projects as a distinct phase are particularly distinctive. While no single service is explicitly exclusive, the cohesive three-legged platform, especially the integration of cultural readiness and pre-ERP project silos, makes their offering truly unique. This holistic approach addresses ERP challenges in a way that contrasts sharply with the industry’s more conventional, reactive methods.

HandsFree ERP’s approach has been well-received by various publications, as it successfully fills a painful gap in the market. The company prides itself on focusing on building the next generation of leaders, with a particular emphasis on women leaders. Kati is an active participant in Women-in-Technology and Women-in-Cloud, and has been awarded Worldwide Who’s Who lifetime recognition, as well as being an Honored Member of The Worldwide Women’s Association.