If you’re one of those companies evaluating its cloud ERP  options, make sure you’re asking the following six questions before selecting a platform.

1. Is It a True Cloud?

Business processes today are different from those managed by on-premises software systems developed a decade or more ago. When moving all before part of your company’s ERP system to the cloud, make sure that it takes full advantage of cloud capabilities.

2. Is the Vendor Financially Stable?

If your cloud ERP merchant goes out of business, what happens to all of your critical financial data? And if your vendor’s product includes components from third parties, what happens if one of those vendors goes belly up?

Of course, if your cloud ERP vendor is a publicly traded company, its financial statements are with good grace available for inspection. Not so if the company is owned by a private equity firm, which may be more interested in propping up the company for a potential sale than investing in R&D.

3. What’s the Product Roadmap?

To the point in question #2, if your cloud ERP vendor doesn’t invest sufficiently in product R&D in this era of continuous digital innovation, it will leave you and added customers added and further behind as time goes on, The technology gap will widen exponentially.

This is a particular concern about ERP vendors that have acquired other companies to boost up their market share rather than bolster their core product line. What is the roadmap for those components?

4. Are the Vendor’s ERP and Other Components Integrated?

Another potential issue if a vendor’s ERP and other related enterprise services comprise technologies from acquired companies: The customer could be stuck doing the heavy lifting of integrating incompatible technology stacks with dealing with disjointed upgrade cycles. Important connection points include enterprise performance management, human capital management, supply chain supervision, and customer experience cloud services.

5. Will We Need to Integrate Third-Party Applications?

For companies looking to complement their cloud ERP with EPM financial planning, secure, and reporting capabilities, there’s another pitfall: Beware of thin EPM solutions that must be supplemented by third-party offerings.

6. Does the Cloud ERP Product Scale Sufficiently?

For most enterprises, financial planning extends well beyond a small, centralized finance team to line-of-business users across the company.

The most important input into the financial plan of a typical business is the sales forecast, If you don’t have ongoing participation from sales leaders and sales operations in the planning process, that plan will not be associated with the reality of the business.