If you’re a manufacturer in the $20M to $250M range researching ERP selection, one of your first questions is probably “what is this going to cost me?” It’s a fair question. Here’s a straightforward answer.
What the market charges
Traditional ERP selection consulting firms typically charge $150 to $300 per hour for advisory work. For a full selection engagement at a midmarket manufacturer, you can expect to see proposals in the range of $75,000 to $200,000 or more for a process that takes 4 to 6 months.
That cost includes extensive requirements gathering (building the 500-line matrix), RFP creation and distribution, demo management and scoring, vendor analysis, and a final recommendation. Some firms also include contract negotiation support.
There are also lighter-touch options. Some firms offer selection advisory at a lower investment with less hands-on support, and some offer specific deliverables like RFP templates or vendor shortlisting as standalone services.
What drives the cost
The biggest driver of selection cost is process complexity, not company size. A single-site manufacturer with one product line will require less effort than a multi-site, multi-division operation with engineer-to-order, configure-to-order, and make-to-stock environments running simultaneously.
Other factors that influence cost include the number of vendors being evaluated, the number of stakeholders involved in the evaluation, whether the selection includes contract negotiation support, and whether the engagement extends into implementation advisory.
The real question isn’t what selection costs
When a $60M manufacturer is about to spend $500,000 to $1.5M on ERP software and implementation services, the selection engagement is 5 to 15 percent of the total project investment.
The question isn’t whether that’s worth it. The question is: what does a bad selection cost?
A failed ERP implementation at a midmarket manufacturer typically costs $500,000 to $2M in direct costs: abandoned software licenses, wasted implementation fees, consultant rework, and the internal team’s time. But the indirect costs are often larger: 12 to 18 months of organizational disruption, damaged customer relationships from late deliveries, departures of key employees who are exhausted from the chaos, and the opportunity cost of every strategic initiative that got shelved during the recovery.
That’s the math that makes the selection investment obvious. You’re not paying $50K for a consulting engagement. You’re paying $50K to dramatically reduce the odds of a $1M+ failure.
A faster process should cost less, not more
One of the problems with the traditional approach is that its length drives up cost. A 4-to-6-month process with hundreds of hours of requirements gathering, multiple rounds of demos, and elaborate scoring models generates a large bill because it generates a lot of hours.
An outcomes-driven approach takes 8 to 12 weeks because it eliminates the work that doesn’t matter. When you focus on 2 to 3 measurable outcomes instead of 500 feature requirements, the entire process is leaner. Fewer hours. Faster decisions. Lower cost. And arguably a better result, because the team maintains momentum and decision fatigue doesn’t have time to set in.
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