What independent ERP advice is (and what it is not)
Ask ten ERP advisors whether they are independent, and ten will say yes. The word sits on almost every website and in almost every pitch. That alone makes it nearly meaningless. If everyone is independent, the claim no longer tells you anything about who genuinely is and who merely says so.
The question that actually helps you as a buyer is therefore not “does this party call itself independent?” but “what does not count as independent?”. That is a sharper question, and it is precisely the one most advisors would rather avoid. Independent ERP advice means the advisor earns nothing from whichever platform you end up choosing. No reseller margin, no partner commission, no success fee. That is the whole test, and anything that deviates from it is not independent advice, however it is dressed up.
The trouble lives in the grey areas. Almost nobody presents themselves as dependent; the parties that are not independent tend to be the loudest about their neutrality. That leaves you, the decision-maker, with an awkward job: separating the real thing from the arrangements that fall just outside it. And those arrangements are neither rare nor extreme. They are the ordinary revenue models of the market, wrapped politely in the language of objectivity.
This article is not about the full definition of independent advice. It is about the boundaries of it. You will read briefly what makes advice independent, and then at length what it is not: the four misconceptions used to stretch the term, why that distinction costs your organisation money, and how to separate appearance from substance in a single conversation.
Independent ERP advice in brief
Independent ERP advice is advice from a party with no commercial stake in your software choice. The advisor earns from the work itself, not from your decision. As a result, the advice is built around your processes and your situation, not around the revenue a particular platform yields for the advisor.
That is the short version. The full account, including when you need independent advice, how it relates to the different roles in the market and what it delivers inside a project, lives in our guide to what independent ERP advice fully involves. Read that if you want the definition end to end.
This article picks up the other end. Not the definition itself, but the frayed edges around it. Because that is where the term gets stretched until it means nothing: in the grey areas where a commercial interest hides behind a neutral label.
The factual basis of independence
Independence is not a feeling or an intention. It is a position you can verify against the same factual conditions that the pillar sets out in full: no reseller or distribution contract with a software vendor, no vendor incentives that move with your choice, and no official certified partner status with a vendor such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, AFAS or Exact. Fall short on any one of them and the neutrality is incomplete, however sincerely the advice is meant.
Two things follow that matter for the rest of this article. First, independence is binary, not a sliding scale. A commercial stake in the outcome either exists or it does not; a little stake is still a stake. An advisor who fails on one of those conditions is not “slightly less independent”, they are simply not independent, and you should weigh the advice accordingly. Second, because reseller contracts, partner statuses and fee structures are facts rather than opinions, independence is testable. You can check it through public sources and an honest conversation, which is exactly what the rest of this piece makes concrete.
That testability is the bridge to the real problem. The conditions are clear enough on paper. What makes them hard in practice is that they are rarely failed openly. They are failed inside constructions that look neutral from the outside, and those constructions are where most of the confusion begins.
What independent advice is not
Here is the heart of it. Most of the confusion around independent ERP advice does not come from people not knowing the definition. It comes from the term being stretched to cover arrangements that factually fall outside it. Four misconceptions come up again and again in our work.
Misconception 1: delivering multiple platforms is the same as being independent
“We are independent, because we deliver both Dynamics and AFAS.” It sounds logical, yet it does not hold. Delivering multiple platforms makes a party broad, not neutral. The advisor still earns on every licence sold, regardless of which of their platforms you choose. Their interest merely shifts from one platform to a handful; it does not disappear.
Multi-vendor and independent are two different things. A multi-vendor party has a commercial stake in several platforms at once; an independent party has a stake in none. The distinction sits in the revenue model, not in the breadth of the portfolio. A party that earns on licences still benefits from a sale, even when the choice between a few of its own platforms is left open.
What we see in practice is that this misconception is often sincere. The advisor genuinely believes in their own neutrality, since they are not pushing a single platform. The blind spot sits a layer deeper: a platform they do not deliver falls outside their portfolio and therefore rarely makes the shortlist in earnest, even when it would fit you better than anything on it. The comparison starts off tilted, not through bad faith, but because the advisor’s horizon ends at their own range. A genuinely independent party can also recommend a platform they will never touch themselves.
The practical effect is easy to picture. Suppose your processes would be served best by a platform the multi-vendor party happens not to resell. That option will not be argued against; it will simply never appear on the longlist in the first place. You will receive a thorough, professional comparison of three or four candidates, all of which sit inside the advisor’s range, and you will have no way of knowing what was left out. The advice can be entirely honest within its boundaries and still steer you away from the right answer, purely because the boundaries were drawn around a portfolio rather than around your situation. That is why breadth of portfolio is no substitute for the absence of a stake.
Misconception 2: “agnostic” while a partner status or margin exists
Many parties describe themselves as technology-agnostic or vendor-neutral while holding an active Gold or Premier Partner status, or a reseller margin that runs alongside the advice. That is a contradiction. A partner status carries obligations: sales targets, joint marketing, priority for the own platform in pitches. Those obligations do not vanish because a website uses the word agnostic.
The clearest case of this misconception is the certified Microsoft reseller who says it also advises on other platforms. A Microsoft-partner firm is by definition not an independent ERP adviser, regardless of whether it also offers other platforms. The certification itself creates a stake in Dynamics, and that stake colours every comparison in which Dynamics is a candidate. This is not a reproach aimed at those parties; it is a factual observation about what a vendor certification means.
This misconception is, happily, the easiest to verify. Partner statuses are listed in the public directories of the vendors themselves. A party that calls itself agnostic while appearing as a certified partner in such a directory is telling two stories that do not fit together. We come across that discrepancy regularly: the website says independent, the vendor lists an active partner status. A gap like that need not be malicious, but it does say something about the discipline with which the position is maintained, and therefore about how much the claim is worth.
Misconception 3: free or strikingly cheap advice
Advice that is free or strikingly cheap is paid for somewhere else. Usually out of the licence margin the advisor later makes on the software, or out of a finder’s fee from the implementation partner you are steered towards. The bill does not disappear, it moves to a place you cannot see, and it is settled through a commercial nudge built into the advice itself.
Independent advice carries a transparent price, because the advisor has no source of income other than the work. This follows from the fact that they cannot fall back on licence revenue or a referral fee to cover the bill. A strikingly low price for the selection phase is therefore not a bargain but a signal: always ask where the rest of the fee comes from.
Watch one common packaging in particular: the marketing contribution. An implementation partner pays an advisory party a fee formally labelled “marketing”, which in practice is tied to the number of clients that party forwards to it. Economically, that is a referral fee. To you it is invisible, and it explains how an advisor can offer their work below cost. The rule of thumb is simple. If the price of the advice does not add up against the hours that go into it, the difference comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere almost always carries a direction in the advice.
The point is not that a low price is automatically suspect. Sometimes an advisor offers a reduced rate for a first engagement to build a relationship, and that is legitimate. The signal to act on is a structural mismatch between price and effort, combined with reluctance to explain how the gap is closed. An advisor whose revenue genuinely comes from the work will tell you exactly how their fee is built, because they have nothing to lose by it. An advisor who deflects the question, or who frames the low price as a favour you should simply accept, is telling you that the real economics live somewhere you are not allowed to look. In a decision this size, that is reason enough to keep asking.
Misconception 4: the implementation partner that also advises
The party that is going to build your ERP system is rarely the right party to judge whether that system was the right choice in the first place. Yet advice and execution are often placed with the same partner, sometimes inside one organisation, sometimes inside one group with an advisory entity and an implementation entity as sister companies. That blending of roles undermines neutrality, even when the intent is good.
The reason is a conflict of interest, not a lack of integrity. Whoever does the work has an interest in a generous scope and a longer timeline, with more modules to build along the way. An independent advisor who does not implement can instead help you trim the scope to what you actually need. The separation between advising and building rests on the same logic as the separation between the auditor who checks the figures and the bookkeeper who keeps them: not because one distrusts the other, but because the roles pull in opposite directions.
The variant to watch most closely is the legal separation that looks tidy on paper. An advisory entity and an implementation entity with different names, but with the same owner, the same directors or the same group-level revenue targets. Formally they are two companies; in practice staff move between them, clients are shared, and the advice points to the sister company remarkably often. A quick check at the chamber of commerce makes the ownership structure visible. If the advisory party sits within a group that also contains an implementation partner or reseller, the separation is more porous than two separate names suggest.
Why this distinction matters for your organisation
An ERP choice is not a purchase for a single year. The software you select will stay with your organisation for ten to fifteen years and touches nearly every business process. Advice that quietly steers you toward the wrong platform does not produce a one-off mistake, then, but years of operating cost you never recover.
The gap between apparent and genuine independence becomes tangible at the most expensive moment: the selection. This follows from the way a skewed recommendation in the selection phase carries through into every implementation choice that comes after it. A scope set too wide, a licence structure that does not fit you, modules you never use; it all begins at the first assessment. Whoever lets that assessment be made by a party with a stake in the outcome pays the difference across the entire life of the system.
Fake independence is therefore a financial risk, not an academic point. An advisor who earns a higher margin on one platform than on another will rarely advise wrongly on purpose. They will simply, and often unconsciously, give a little more weight to the arguments that land on the choice that suits them most. That human tendency is enough to push a multi-year decision in the wrong direction, without anyone holding bad intentions.
The effect also compounds. A platform that does not quite fit your processes forces customisation. Customisation makes every future upgrade more costly and more risky. Costlier upgrades lead to deferred maintenance, and deferred maintenance leads in time to a system that holds your growth back rather than supporting it. None of these costs appears in the quotation for the selection phase. They unfold only in the years after, and by then the cause, an assessment that was a shade too coloured, is long out of view. That is what makes a skewed starting recommendation so treacherous: its price arrives late and spread out.
What makes the risk harder to manage is that the bias is invisible at the very moment you most need to see it. During selection, every option still looks open and every advisor sounds reasonable. The recommendation that gently favours one platform reads exactly like the recommendation that follows the evidence; the difference shows up only later, in the friction of daily use and the bill for the next upgrade. You cannot audit the advice against an outcome you do not yet have. This is precisely why the structural question, does this party have a stake in what we choose, matters more than the polish of the report. A clean structure is the only thing you can verify before the consequences arrive, which is why it deserves more weight than any single argument inside the advice itself.
This is exactly why the separation between advice and commerce is worth watching. For the independent selection of the right package and the right partner, a neutral assessment up front is the cheapest insurance against an expensive mistake. The cost of the advice is dwarfed by the cost of a wrong choice you carry with you for ten years. The same logic holds for independent advice during the implementation itself, where neutral oversight keeps the scope honest while the build runs.
How to separate appearance from substance in a conversation
You do not need to request contracts to form a first impression. Three questions, asked in an exploratory conversation, separate most appearance from the real thing. The tone of the answers often says as much as their content.
The first question: “Do you earn anything from whichever platform we choose, in any form at all?” Listen not only to the answer but to the nuance behind it. An independent party says no without hesitation and explains how the revenue model actually works instead. An evasive answer (“that is nuanced”, “we have good contacts”) is, in itself, already an answer.
The second question: “Do you hold a partner status or reseller contract with a software vendor?” This is a factual question with a factual answer. A partner status is, moreover, publicly verifiable in the vendors’ partner directories, so an inaccurate answer will almost certainly surface. The third question: “Do you implement the platforms you advise on yourselves?” A yes means advice and execution sit in one hand, with the blending of roles that comes with it.
The skill lies in weighing the three answers together. One clear no on all three, well-founded and without hesitation, is a strong signal. Three evasive answers are just as strong a signal in the other direction. It gets harder with a mixed picture: a party with no reseller contract that nonetheless implements its own platforms, or one that works agnostically but maintains a marketing relationship with a single partner. In that case, keep asking until you understand where the money comes from and what direction follows from it. Not to catch the party out, but to know how to read the advice. An honest advisor welcomes those questions; they offer the chance to make the position clear.
A party that is genuinely independent answers these three questions without reserve. This follows from the fact that a transparent revenue model has nothing to hide; the openness is the proof. These three questions are a first filter, not a complete test. For the full assessment, with seven testable criteria and how to weigh the answers against each other, the complete guide to independent ERP advice sets out the method in full.
How we ourselves stand in this test is, of course, fair game. ERP Company is not a Microsoft-partner firm and holds no vendor certification with any supplier whatsoever. That is a deliberate choice rather than an accident of history. Our 265+ specialists draw their platform knowledge from years of hands-on practice across a range of systems, not from a commercial tie to any vendor.
Frequently asked questions
What is independent ERP advice exactly?
Independent ERP advice is advice from a party that earns nothing from your software choice. No reseller margin, no partner commission, no success fee. The advice is therefore built around your processes and your situation, not around the revenue a platform yields for the advisor.
Is an advisor who delivers multiple platforms automatically independent?
No. Delivering multiple platforms makes a party broad, not independent. As long as the party earns on licences, a commercial stake in a sale exists. Independence requires that stake to be absent entirely, not spread across more platforms.
Is a Microsoft-partner firm an independent ERP adviser?
No. A certified Microsoft reseller has a commercial stake in Dynamics, even when it advises on other platforms. The partner status brings sales targets and priority for the own platform. That stake colours every comparison in which Dynamics is a candidate, whatever the intent.
What is fake independence in ERP advice?
Fake independence is claiming a neutral position while a commercial stake in the software choice exists. Examples: an agnostic profile with an active partner status, free advice paid for out of licence margin, or advice and implementation inside the same group.
How do I recognise genuine independence in a conversation?
Ask three factual questions: does the party earn from your platform choice, does it hold a partner status or reseller contract, and does it implement what it advises. A genuinely independent party answers all three without reserve. Evasive answers are, in themselves, a signal.
Does an implementation partner that also advises count as independent?
No. Whoever does the work has an interest in a wide scope and more modules, and therefore cannot judge neutrally whether the system was the right choice. The separation between advising and building protects you from that blending of roles, however good the partner is.
Next step
Independence cannot be read off a website. It can be tested, and the three questions in this article are a fine place to start. Are you unsure about the position of a party you are in conversation with, or would you like to think through your own selection or implementation question out loud?
Get in touch for a no-strings conversation. No proposal track and no sales tone, just an honest look at what your question actually needs. We are happy to answer the three questions for ourselves first, before you share your situation.