A mid-sized manufacturer was a few weeks from switching its operations onto a new ERP. The in-house team had done most of the work themselves, and they had done it well — but the same people who built the configuration were also the ones expected to run the business the morning after it went live. Everyone in the room knew what that meant. The period after a cutover is when the edge cases arrive, and it tends to arrive all at once.
They did not need a second project team. They needed one experienced pair of hands who already understood the system, available for the stretch where it mattered and gone again once the business had settled.
What the gap really was
- The team that built the configuration could not also absorb the support load the moment it went live.
- Day-one problems would be specific to their setup, so a generic support desk would have spent the first fortnight just learning the ground.
- The need was temporary — carrying headcount through the quiet months afterwards made no sense.
- Whoever came in had to leave the in-house team more capable, not more dependent.
How we approached it
We fielded one consultant who had run go-lives of this kind before, on the same platform. We spent time on the configuration before the cutover rather than after it, so the person was useful from the first day rather than the third week. They sat with the client’s team, took the same calls, and were accountable to the delivery lead for the work — not parked at arm’s length on a separate report.
As the support load eased, we scaled the engagement down on a schedule the client set, not on ours. The consultant wrote down what they had fixed and why as they went, so the answers stayed with the in-house team rather than leaving in a contractor’s notebook. Because we also build and run systems like this, we knew which problems would surface first and staffed for them.
Where it stands
The go-live held, and the period that usually breaks confidence in a new system passed without the in-house team being overwhelmed. By the time we stepped back, the people who run the ERP every day owned the answers to the questions that had come up. The client kept the continuity through the difficult weeks and carried none of the cost into the calm ones.