When a bridge is 70 percent finished, you can see it. With an ERP system you see nothing at all. Unless you have stood inside it yourself.
A bridge is honest. Its progress hangs visibly in the landscape, every pillar is a witness. An ERP program is the opposite. What is reported to you there as „70 percent finished“ you cannot check. You can only believe it or judge it. And only someone who knows the machine from the inside can judge it.
That is why, with an IT program, at its core you do not buy the delivery. You buy the ability to judge your own supplier. Without it, you pay every effort you are quoted, because you have no second yardstick.
The two numbers
An example. At one client a rebuild of the SAP landscape was due, operations still lay with the incumbent provider, a big name. Its price for continued operation was high, and to everyone in the room it was simply „the market price“. I set up a tender and described the task cleanly in technical terms, what the rebuild really demanded and what not. The moment the task lay precisely on the table, the picture tipped: the incumbent was far above what the thing costs. After a pilot the client moved into long-term production with a considerably cheaper partner. Not because I negotiated harder. Because I knew the right number.
Where the eye comes from
You do not get this X-ray eye from slides. You get it from the nights before. As a beginner I ran a kernel patch on a live hospital system, a parameter sat wrong, and the system would not come back up. It took far too long until, together with the on-call duty, we had it up again. I accompanied release changes across entire weekends and learned that the usual transports do not cover everything, and what happens when you notice that only on Sunday evening.
Once we physically fetched the old hardware of a data center. An admin as a lone fighter, a chain smoker; we loaded the servers into the car and kept them at our place only until the copies were through. The smell of smoke hung in the machines for days afterwards. Such things stand in no offer. But whoever has done them knows afterwards how long something really takes.
The reverse case belongs to it too: sometimes experience warns you off a price that is too cheap. „Can do anything, costs almost nothing“ sounds good, until the first conversation. After that you know whether someone has ever done the work. I then preferred to work with the more expensive but dependable partners.
Whoever has never been under the hood has to believe what the supplier says. Whoever has been inside can check. That is the whole difference, and it decides over a great deal of money.
For your next offer that means concretely: can you hold the quoted effort against one of your own, drawn from your own hand? If not, you are buying it blind.
With an IT program you do not buy delivery. You buy the ability to judge your own supplier. Everything else is trust without control.