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How to tackle the challenges of implementing an ERP for your international business
About
ERP projects don’t fail because of the software. They fail because companies underestimate what breaks as they scale: visibility, control, and collaboration.
This webinar brought together two industry experts who have seen these challenges firsthand, Romain Libeau, CEO and Co-Founder of Pivot, and Ville Ojala, Interim CFO at Staria, to cut through ERP theory and focus on what actually matters for CFOs leading scaling, international businesses.
1. The value behind record-to-report (R2R)
Question: When you look at a scaling finance team, where does record-to-report (R2R) break first?
Answer: R2R is a process that can (and often does) break as companies scale, largely due to consolidation challenges across entities, countries, and currencies.
Key takeaway: Two core pain points emerge quickly in multi-country environments:
- Visibility
- Controls
Without both, finance teams struggle to manage complexity as the business grows.
2. Optimizing procurement for spend control
Question: What’s the benefit of including procurement early when setting up an ERP?
Answer: ERP implementation isn’t about fixing a single process. The real value comes from streamlining financial operations end to end.
Key takeaway: Procure-to-pay (P2P) is a core finance function and should be addressed early. The success of record-to-report depends on clean input data. Without it, there’s no accurate reporting and no real visibility into spend.
R2R helps finance teams understand their spend position in real time, not weeks or months later. There’s also a significant risk component tied to poor R2R processes.
“If you just want to validate invoices, sorry, but it’s too late. Someone has already committed, whether you like it or not,” said Romain.
Question: What role do integrations play in maximizing ERP value?
Answer: ERP is the system of record, and pushing data into it is inherently complex. Poor data architecture limits the value you can extract. To work properly, integrations must support bi-directional syncing and respect ERP business rules.
3. Removing reporting friction in multi-entity environments
Question: In multi-entity environments, is the challenge more about systems or processes?
Answer: It’s rarely one or the other—it’s both. ERP provides the platform, but teams still need to define charts of accounts, closing timelines, and consistent operating processes.
“What I also see is that finance leaders make poor processes work for too long,” said Ville.
Key takeaway: Don’t operate a multi-entity business as if it were a single entity. Clean, centralized data is the foundation for visibility and informed decision-making across entities.
4. Unified processes for international growth
Question: How do you standardize processes without slowing the business down?
Answer: CFOs face a central question: should processes stay local to maintain control, or does that introduce the risk of becoming a bottleneck?
Key takeaway: Both centralized and decentralized models can work. What matters most is routing the right actions to the right people, with the right level of visibility, regardless of structure.
5. Avoiding ERP implementation shortfalls
Question: CFOs often see ERP implementation as a milestone, but it’s more than that. How should they think about the journey?
Answer: ERP is a living platform, not a one-off project. It’s an ongoing journey.
- Phase 1: Go-live is the starting point. Modern ERP implementations are faster than they used to be, but go-live is just the beginning.
- Phase 2: Optimize and extend to improve efficiency.
- Phase 3: Build data-driven capabilities, improve data quality, and refine processes.
Key takeaway: CFOs should focus heavily on preparation, review demos, understand key features, evaluate user experience, and plan for change management.
“Treat it as a roadmap where go-live is just the beginning,” said Ville.
Final thoughts
ERP success doesn’t come from the implementation alone. It comes from how well the organization adopts new processes, uses data, and manages change.
CFOs don’t need to run ERP projects day to day, but they do need to own the outcome. That means setting clear expectations, driving process discipline, and ensuring the business understands that ERP is not a one-time project, but a long-term operating platform. When record-to-report, procurement, and multi-entity processes are designed to work together, ERP becomes a foundation for better decisions, not just a system for closing the books.
Interested in the full conversation? Watch the full recording here.
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