Does your ERP rollout feel like an anti-climax? Here’s why.

Champagne corks popping? Congratulations on Slack? Roll-out of an ERP like NetSuite can feel like a defining moment. It should do, too. It’s the kind of large-scale project that relentlessly chews up months of planning, budget, and executive attention. So when you hit that milestone and go-live finally happens, it’s totally natural to want to take a victory lap. But then something unexpected happens.Teams across the business simply… keep working outside the system that you’ve been sweating over. Instead of embracing the new setup, they quietly drift back to their old ways. Spreadsheets resurface. Slack messages replace approvals. Procurement by PDF makes its grand return. And just like that, your ERP risks becoming a siloed tool. Popular with finance, but not many other departments. The tech is implemented, for sure. But it’s not adopted.

Why implementation ≠ transformation

This is the fundamental problem: too often implementation gets celebrated like it's the finish line, when in reality it’s only the first step. Going live is just the beginning - not the end. Not even close.

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So what’s happened? You’ve ticked all the right boxes. The workflows are flowing. The permissions are permissioning. There’s a fresh stack of training decks just waiting. So why aren’t more people actually using the system in their day-to-day work? You’ve built the rocket ship. Why is it still sat on the launchpad?

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Here’s the thing. Getting an ERP like NetSuite up and running is only about 20% of the job. The rest is making sure people actually use it. The remaining 80% is the messy, difficult bit: getting people to adopt the system, consistently, without needing a tutorial or a call to IT every time they need to raise a PO.

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Because without daily, widespread adoption, the ERP can’t deliver what it promised. It won’t generate reliable data, streamline procurement, or connect finance to the rest of the organisation.

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Why you’re not hitting your NetSuite spot

Let’s get one thing straight: the problem isn’t the ERP. Platforms like NetSuite are robust, scalable, and powerful. But procurement is complex (especially for the people in ops, marketing and other functions who also need to engage with it). Its language and vocabulary don’t always match how teams communicate day-to-day. Most ERPs are built with finance in mind. Which makes sense: they’re the ones signing off on it.

But that’s where the friction starts. Its UI, processes and language can feel intimidating, and the result is that approvals start bottlenecking. So what do people do? They opt out. Back to Excel. Back to email. Back to that random workaround they insist “just works better.” It’s not rebellion – it’s survival. These workarounds may be easy in the short term, but they unravel everything the ERP is supposed to deliver: visibility, control, and consistency.

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The Hidden Costs of Low Adoption

Poor ERP adoption doesn’t just stall transformation. It creates a cascade of problems across the business. Suddenly, you’ve got no real-time spend visibility. Finance is trying to piece the puzzle together from five different spreadsheets, and what can be gleaned from pleading with colleagues on Slack.

Meanwhile, you’re paying per user, whether those users are ‘using’ or not. Every new legal entity adds cost. Every new workaround adds risk. You can see your ROI disappearing off over the horizon. You didn’t buy an ERP to become more inefficient. But without adoption, that’s exactly what happens. NetSuite becomes a cost centre instead of a value driver.

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What’s the fix?

Fixing this doesn’t mean swapping out your ERP. You simply need to turbo-charge its adoption with a tool that makes it easier for people to engage. If you actually want to squeeze value out of your ERP investment, it’s time to stop obsessing over implementation, and start focusing on usage.

Start by asking a few brutally honest questions:

Are teams actually using the ERP day to day?
Is the experience intuitive enough that they want to?
Does the system integrate with the tools they already use (without needing a cheat sheet and a support ticket)?

Because if the answer to any of those is no, you’ve got a user experience problem. Not a training or motivation problem. A design problem.

Improving adoption means designing with the end-user in mind, and this is where Pivot changes the game.

It sits on top of NetSuite and gives non-finance users a way in, without asking them to become part-time ERP consultants. Think of it as a translation layer between your ERP and the humans who are supposed to use it.

By radically simplifying procurement workflows, it gives teams a much better user experience, encourages collaboration, and helps organisations get more value from their ERP (but without forcing anyone to become an expert in NetSuite).

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Final thoughts

Here’s the truth. An ERP rollout is a huge step. But it’s not the last one. Going live isn’t the win. Staying live is.

Transformation doesn’t happen when your ERP starts running, it happens when people actually want to use it. So once your NetSuite integration is up and running, ask yourself the next important question: is anyone actually using it?

And if not, maybe it’s time to rethink the layer between your system and your people.

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