By 2013 the ERP implementation market had a problem it was reluctant to name publicly. Demand for experienced consultants substantially exceeded supply, and the gap was being filled by people who had been given a certification, a methodology deck and a client to learn on. The arithmetic was straightforward. A decade of large-scale ERP deployment had created an installed base requiring upgrades, extensions and replacements. Cloud ERP was opening a mid-market that had previously been unable to afford these systems. Emerging markets were deploying enterprise systems for the first time. Meanwhile the consultants who had learned their craft on the implementations of the late 1990s and early 2000s were moving into management, retiring, or leaving consulting for client-side roles that paid similarly and involved less travel. The result was predictable and visible on projects everywhere: teams staffed with three genuinely experienced people and fifteen who were learning on a live engagement.
What Experience Actually Provides
The distinction matters because it is frequently misunderstood as product knowledge, which is the part that can be taught. A certified consultant can configure the system. They know the transaction codes, the configuration tables, the standard functionality and the documented options. That knowledge is real and it is not the scarce input. What experience provides is a different set of judgements. Knowing which requirements to refuse. Every implementation generates demands for customisation. An experienced consultant can distinguish the genuine business necessity from the preserved habit, and can explain to a business owner why their current way of working is not worth the maintenance liability. An inexperienced one either builds everything requested or refuses everything, and both are wrong. Recognising the failure pattern early. Projects fail in identifiable ways — data migration underestimated, business ownership absent, scope expanding through unmanaged change, testing compressed, training deferred. Someone who has seen five projects recognises the signature in month two. Someone on their first sees it in month nine, when it is expensive. Understanding what the configuration will do in operation. A setting that is technically correct can be operationally disastrous at month-end, at year-end, at volume, or when an exception occurs. This knowledge is almost entirely experiential and is not in any documentation. Estimating credibly. The difference between a plan that holds and one that slips by 60% is usually not method. It is someone who has actually done the thing knowing how long it takes. And managing the political dimension. Implementations reallocate power, expose performance and change what is visible to whom. Consultants who cannot read that dynamic get blindsided by resistance they interpreted as a technical objection.
How the Shortage Was Concealed
The commercial pressure to appear fully staffed produced a set of practices that were widely understood and rarely discussed. Pyramid staffing with thin supervision. One experienced lead nominally overseeing eight junior consultants across three workstreams, in practice able to review a fraction of the work. Bait and switch on named resources. The proposal named senior consultants with relevant sector experience. They appeared at kickoff and were rotated onto the next sales opportunity within weeks. Certification presented as competence. Vendor certification programmes expanded to meet demand, and certification was offered to clients as evidence of capability. It evidences product familiarity, not judgement. Methodology substituted for expertise. Detailed templates and stage gates are genuinely useful in the hands of someone who understands what the stages are for. As a replacement for understanding, they produce compliant documentation and unaddressed risk. And rotation destroyed continuity. Consultants moved between projects mid-engagement, and each handover lost context the documentation did not contain.
What Clients Could Actually Do
Contract for named individuals with replacement rights. Specify the people, require CVs, interview them, and write in that substitution requires client approval with an equivalently qualified replacement. Without this, the staffing plan is aspirational. Define the experience mix and test it. Not "a senior consultant", but how many full-cycle implementations in a comparable industry and scale, verifiable through reference checks with previous clients rather than the vendor. Invest in internal capability from day one. The most valuable protection against consultant turnover is client-side people who understand the system. This costs money during implementation and saves considerably more afterward, because the alternative is permanent dependency on external support for changes the organization should be able to make itself. Structure payment around outcomes. Time and materials rewards duration. Even partial outcome linkage changes the incentive to staff the project with people who will finish it. Buy independent review. An experienced advisor with no stake in the implementation, reviewing design decisions and project health periodically, is cheap relative to the cost of the failure they catch. Most organizations resist this as duplicated cost and it has one of the best returns available on an ERP programme. And slow down if the team is not there. A project staffed with people learning on it will take longer regardless of what the plan says. Accepting that in the schedule is better than discovering it in month nine.
| Capability | Evidence or protection to request |
|---|---|
| Comparable implementation experience | Verify full-cycle work through previous-client references |
| Configuration judgement | Review design choices, operational consequences and requirements challenged |
| Supervision | Make the experience mix, supervision structure and named mentors explicit |
| Continuity | Require client-controlled substitution, overlap and handover records |
| Client-side capability | Build internal understanding during implementation, not after it |
Qualitative summary of this article's source text, not a measured outcome or performance estimate.
The Vendor Side of the Argument
There is a fair defence of the consulting firms, and it is worth stating because it explains why the situation persisted. Experience cannot be manufactured on demand. It takes several full project cycles to develop, which is four to six years, and the demand curve moved faster than that. A firm that declined work it could not staff with senior people would have handed the market to competitors who did not decline it, and would have had no mechanism for developing the next generation of experienced consultants either — because that development happens on projects. The honest position is that junior consultants have to learn somewhere, on real engagements, and clients collectively benefit from that pipeline existing. The failure was not in staffing projects with people who were learning. It was in pricing them as though they were not, in concealing the mix, and in providing supervision ratios that made genuine learning impossible. A transparent arrangement — stated experience mix, differentiated rates, explicit supervision structure, named mentors — would have served everyone better. A few firms did this. Most found it commercially uncomfortable.
Practical Guidance for ERP Staffing
- Name individuals in the contract and control substitution. A role-based staffing plan is not a commitment to anything.
- Verify full-cycle experience through client references, not vendor CVs. Ask specifically how many go-lives the person has been through in a comparable environment.
- Set and monitor a supervision ratio. One experienced lead across three workstreams is a documented risk, not a staffing model.
- Build internal capability during the project, not after it. Client-side understanding is the only durable defence against consultant turnover.
- Link some payment to outcomes. Pure time and materials pays for duration, which is the opposite of what you want.
- Commission independent design and health review. An outside experienced view costs a fraction of the failure it prevents.
- Treat continuity as a deliverable. Require handover documentation and overlap periods when consultants rotate, and price the disruption if they do not.
- Adjust the schedule to the team you actually have. A learning team on an aggressive plan produces a late project and a poor system.
The Regional Situation
In the Gulf, this shortage has been sharper than in mature markets, and for structural reasons that have not gone away. Demand has grown faster than the local talent pool. National transformation programmes, rapid growth in government digitisation, large infrastructure and development projects and an expanding mid-market have all driven enterprise system deployment. The population of consultants who have completed multiple full-cycle implementations in the region is small relative to that demand. Localisation experience is a genuinely distinct skill. A consultant with ten global implementations may still have never configured wage protection system payroll files, end-of-service gratuity accrual under local labour law, GOSI contributions, Saudisation reporting, VAT under the GCC framework, or ZATCA e-invoicing with its structured format and clearance requirements. These are not minor configuration items; they are areas where getting it wrong produces regulatory exposure. Regional experience is a separate qualification from product experience and should be assessed separately. Multi-entity and free-zone structures raise the complexity floor. Groups routinely operate a dozen or more legal entities across mainland and free zones in several countries, each with distinct reporting, tax and licensing obligations. Designing a chart of accounts and organizational structure that supports per-entity statutory reporting and group consolidation is an experienced-person problem, and errors here are expensive to unwind after go-live. Bilingual requirements are frequently discovered late. Arabic-language master data, bilingual statutory documents and right-to-left rendering in printed output are requirements that appear obvious in retrospect and are routinely missed in design by teams without regional experience. Visa timelines constrain staffing flexibility. Bringing a consultant into the country involves employment visa and Emirates ID processing with real lead times. A staffing gap cannot be filled as quickly as it can in a market with free movement, which raises the cost of losing a key person mid-project and makes named-resource contracting more important, not less. And client-side capability building has a specific value here. Where national workforce development is a policy priority and in-country value or Saudisation requirements apply, structuring the implementation to transfer capability to national staff serves both the commercial interest and the regulatory one. Organizations that treat this as a compliance box rather than a real objective end up with neither.
What Has Changed Since
The shortage was not resolved; it moved. Cloud ERP reduced the technical infrastructure work and shifted the scarce skill toward configuration judgement, integration design and change management — which are harder to teach than basis administration. The shortage became more acute in exactly the areas where experience matters most. Offshore delivery scaled significantly, which addressed cost and volume and introduced its own version of the problem: large teams with deep product knowledge and limited exposure to the client's business context, which is precisely the judgement gap. And AI-assisted implementation tooling is now entering the picture, with configuration recommendations, automated testing, migration assistance and documentation generation. It genuinely reduces the mechanical work, which is real value. It does not touch the scarce input. Deciding whether a requirement is legitimate, recognising that a project is failing, understanding what a configuration will do at month-end in the third entity, and managing the politics of a process change remain judgement problems. If anything, tooling that accelerates production without improving judgement raises the stakes: a team can now build the wrong thing considerably faster than it could in 2013. The constraint was never the number of people who could configure the system. It was the number who knew what should be configured, and that has not become easier to manufacture.
Common Questions
Why was there an ERP consultant shortage?
Demand from upgrades, cloud-driven mid-market adoption and emerging market deployment grew faster than experienced consultants could be developed, while the cohort who learned on the large implementations of the late 1990s moved into management, client-side roles or retirement.
Is certification a reliable indicator of capability?
No. Certification demonstrates product knowledge, which can be taught in weeks. The scarce capability is judgement — knowing which requirements to refuse, recognising failure patterns early, understanding operational consequences of configuration choices, and estimating credibly.
How can clients protect themselves?
Name individuals in the contract with substitution control, verify full-cycle experience through client references, monitor supervision ratios, build internal capability during the project, link some payment to outcomes, and commission independent design and health review.
Does regional experience matter separately from product experience?
Yes. Wage protection system payroll, gratuity accrual, GOSI, Saudisation reporting, GCC VAT, ZATCA e-invoicing, multi-entity free-zone structures and bilingual output are distinct competencies that a globally experienced consultant may never have configured.
Strategic ERP Staffing — Outpace verifies who is actually on your project, builds the internal capability to outlast them, and reviews the design before it becomes a live system.