Every quote on the table assumes the implementation works. The right comparison is the five-year cost of a successful Embrace implementation against the five-year cost of the likely outcome elsewhere.
Compare outcomes, not quotes
When you compare ERP quotes, you are comparing the price of success. The industry data says you should not assume it: independent research consistently finds that 50–75% of ERP implementations fail or run significantly over budget on the first attempt, and actual five-year costs regularly run several multiples of the original quote once overruns, change orders, rework and support gaps are counted.
So the right comparison is not quote against quote. It is the five-year total cost of a successful Embrace implementation against the five-year cost of the likely outcome elsewhere: implementation risk, customisation timelines, post-go-live support quality, and what it costs if things go wrong.
What you are paying for
Some vendors will quote you a lower number than us, particularly on implementation. The difference is almost always the same thing: a partner margin layer and the loss of direct accountability for your go-live. Embrace is different in three specific ways.
- The calibre of the people: Your project is staffed by experienced consultants who know the product deeply, backed by the developers who build it. A mid-market South African business is a priority account for ACS in a way it rarely is for a large vendor’s reseller network.
- The same team, before and after go-live: Most implementations end with a hand-off to a support desk that has never seen your system. Our implementation team stays involved, through go-live, the first month-end and beyond, because the support relationship is our business model, not an afterthought.
- Incentives that match yours: A reseller gets paid whether your implementation succeeds or not. Our ongoing revenue depends on you staying on the system, using it well and renewing, year after year. An unhappy client costs us far more than a hard project does.
That is what the implementation investment buys: a materially higher probability of going live successfully, first time, with the people who built your system still in the room afterwards. It is why we have maintained a 100% implementation success rate over 40 years, including at clients who came to us after being burnt elsewhere.
What drives the price
There is no honest one-size-fits-all ERP price, which is why we scope before we quote.
Scope: The number of modules, sites, companies and users, and the complexity of your processes. A multi-entity group with manufacturing, distribution and a workshop is a different project from a single-site distributor.
Customisation: Embrace builds on the standard solution wherever it fits, and we will guide you towards it. Where your business genuinely needs something different, that is scoped and priced openly, not discovered later as change orders.
Data and integration: The state of your current data, and what Embrace needs to talk to.
Structure: A typical engagement combines the licence, the implementation, and an annual licence and technology upgrade fee that funds ongoing development and support. Implementation payments can be structured against project milestones, so your outlay tracks delivered progress.
What we will not do is name a number before we understand your business. A price without a scope is a guess, and guesses are how ERP projects end up in the failure statistics.
The cost of doing nothing
The most expensive system is often the one you already have. Before comparing vendor quotes, put a number on the current situation: hours spent on manual stock reconciliation, inventory write-offs from errors better data would prevent, debtors days above benchmark, the extra days finance spends closing each month, sales lost because stock visibility was wrong. For most businesses at the point of evaluating ERP, that figure is substantial, recurring, and growing. Our pre-sales investigation quantifies it with you, so the investment decision is made against your real numbers, not against the lowest quote in the room.
How We Implement
The eight-step, ACS-led method behind our 100% implementation success rate.
