ERP replacement without standstill: how an Anger-based production company migrated in 6 months

An ERP switch is considered one of the riskiest IT projects an SME can undertake. That assessment is not wrong — but it leads many companies to put off replacing an outdated system for years, even though the pressure to act has long been there.

A production company in Anger with 38 employees and annual revenues of just under 12 million euros completed the switch in six months. Without production stoppage, without lost data, and with daily business running. Here's how it played out.

Starting position: software that grew until it stalled

The company had used a self-developed ERP system for 15 years — originally built by a programmer from the neighbourhood, expanded several times since, never fundamentally overhauled. It ran. Most of the time.

The problems were not spectacular but constant: reports had to be reworked manually in Excel. Stock movements were captured twice because the system had no direct interface to production control. New employees needed four to six weeks until they could roughly handle the system — not because they were slow learners, but because the user interface reflected 15-year-old logic.

The trigger for the decision was pragmatic: the original developer was retiring. New maintenance effort, no documentation, no successor. At that point at the latest, you have to act.

Why we set six months — and how it broke down

Six months sounds long. In fact, for a complete ERP switch with data migration, training and parallel testing, it is rather sporty. The breakdown:

Months 1–2: requirements capture and data assessment. What must the new system do? Not what people wish for, but what they really need. We held one-on-one conversations with all department heads — purchasing, production, warehouse, sales — and built a prioritised requirements list. In parallel: data cleansing. The old system had over 2,400 article masters, 380 of which had not moved in more than three years. These were cleared out before they migrated to the new system.

Months 3–4: setup and data migration. For mid-sized production businesses of this size, we deploy Lyrion ERP — modular, adaptable to industry-specific workflows, without licence fees that scale with the company. The migration of cleansed master data took three days. The migration of open orders, stock balances and ongoing production orders was checked manually — line by line, not by bulk import. That is more laborious, but no junk data comes along.

Month 5: parallel testing. For four weeks, the old system continued to run, the new one in parallel. All booking-relevant transactions were captured in both systems. Differences were reconciled daily. That costs effort — about 20 percent extra work for the four employees involved — but it provides certainty no other method offers.

Month 6: go-live and stabilisation. Cutover was a Monday in the middle of the month — deliberately not at the start of the month (too many parallel closing activities) and not at the end of the month (too little buffer for issues). The first two weeks were intense: short daily sync calls, quick reactions to feedback from production, three minor adjustments to the user interface.

What's different three months after go-live

The warehouse manager mentioned something he hadn't expected: stocktaking. In the old system, stocktaking was a three-day endeavour with paper lists and subsequent manual entry. With the new system: one and a half days, of which one day was actual counting and half a day reconciliation in the system.

The double capture of stock movements is history. Reports run automatically. And new employees, according to the owner, now need three to five days until they can work independently — instead of the previous four to six weeks.

For questions on ERP migration or on replacing custom software, our page on Lyrion ERP is the starting point. For technical support on digitalisation projects — from requirements capture to commissioning — we offer a structured advisory format described under IT Consulting & Digitalisation.