Send us a message about this episode!

Two weeks ago, in the Acumatica 2026 R2 review, Pete and Nirav said every manufacturer with shop floor activity should probably have something like Acumatica's shop floor kiosk. Pete admits that's quite a big claim, so this week they put version two of the kiosk on screen to see if it holds up. Nirav Shah of AdCirrus ERP drives the demo, and Pete asks the questions an operator, a supervisor and a data person would ask. It's a screen demo, so it's best watched on YouTube.

In this episode:

• Pen, paper and Larry: how shop floor time actually gets captured
• Why consumption pricing puts operatives on the ERP, and why they don't want a desk
• What a work centre means in ERP terms, from cost centres to stage gates
• On hand vs available for issue, lot and serial capture, and clocking into more than one job
• Real-time labour costing, and a morning report of what the night shift did
• The kiosk's current gaps, honestly
• Rollout: kill the old process, support nights, own the data, pilot one work centre

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP)

No sponsors, no adverts. Full transcripts are now on abcsoferp.com, should your AI agent fancy a free implementation.

Support the show

Send us a message about this episode!

Acumatica 2026 R2 is the release that switches the classic UI off for good, and the one where AI stops being a preview and becomes something you connect your own model to. There are hundreds of changes in it. Pete, who works inside a business that runs Acumatica every day, and Nirav Shah of AdCirrus ERP, who implements it for a living, picked the eight that manufacturers and distributors should care about. Then they settled whether to take it now.

In this episode:

• Classic UI is gone: why the browsers forced it, and what it means for your customisations
• Bring your own AI through the MCP connector, and the pricing question nobody's answered yet
• Why AI is only as good as your Generic Inquiries and master data
• The AI assistant, dashboards built from a chat, and wiki answers that cost no AI units
• Available to promise across every warehouse, and why it lives or dies on your dates
• Shop floor kiosk 2.0, Shopify restocking fees, 1099 e-filing and the native data warehouse
• The verdict: take R2, but not the first build

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah

No sponsors, no adverts. Hate mail, however, can now be sent in an official capacity: podcast@abcsoferp.com.

Support the show

Send us a message about this episode!

There's one piece of ERP work you keep putting off. You trust your partner, you like them, they answer the phone. But this particular job needs experience they don't have. This week Pete, Nirav and Emily are joined by Ken Sebahar, who has been implementing Navision since 2001, used to co-host A Shot of Business Central and a Beer, and has just written a white paper, The Multi-Partner Advantage. The question is whether you can bring in a specialist without blowing up the relationship that already works.

In this episode:

• "Who asked you to change partners?" Adding a specialist doesn't mean leaving your partner
• What a partner strategy is, and why you need one even with a single partner
• The EDI test: is it the best solution, or the one your partner knows?
• How to tell your current partner without making them feel fired
• Who you call when it breaks: primary support partner, partner team, clear lines
• AppSource, curated app lists and owning your own system
• When one partner is plenty

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP) · Emily Browning
Guest: Ken Sebahar, independent Business Central consultant and advisor, Speaking Business Central (speakingbusinesscentral.com)

No sponsors, no adverts.

Support the show

Send us a message about this episode!

At some point in every ERP project, someone says "we'll pick that up in phase two" — and the room nods, because it's the sentence that lets everyone stop arguing. Then you go live, orders go out, invoices go out, and that list quietly becomes something nobody talks about. This week Pete, Nirav and Emily try to work out what phase two actually is, why it so rarely happens, and whether it should be called phase two at all.

In this episode:

• What actually lands in phase two — and what you get free just by being on a modern ERP
• Why phase one never finishes when the MVP gets lost
• Six reasons phase two dies: no date, no team, no appetite, and the people who leave
• Book the audit, re-map the process, and let the business — not IT — drive it
• What can't wait: cloud tax, native financials, barcoding, AP automation, and anything that touches transactions
• Already on WMS or EDI? That's phase one, not phase two
• No automation until the team can fly manually

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP) · Emily Browning

No sponsors, no adverts. We were going to sort that out in phase two.

Support the show

Send us a message about this episode!

The demos are done, the contract's signed, and a calendar invite has landed that just says "discovery". This week Pete, Nirav and Emily take on the first real phase of an ERP implementation — the week where the business has to explain how it actually operates, and where projects are quietly won or lost.

Emily opens with the definition worth pinning to the wall: discovery week is the kickoff, and its entire purpose is that the requirements get laid out now. Her test for a good one is blunt — if a pile of new requirements turns up mid-project, the discovery wasn't done properly. Nirav draws the line most businesses miss: the discovery you got during the sales cycle was a "do we have a deal?" exercise, not the real thing. The real thing starts after signature, and the last 10% it surfaces is what makes or breaks the project.

From there it gets practical. Why sessions run by department, so the order entry team can complain about finance in peace (and vice versa). Pete's four buckets for every gap that comes up — configuration, customisation, training, or a business process change — and Nirav on what genuinely forces the customisation route: compliance, third-party integrations, and people who simply won't change. Emily's rule might be the most valuable thing in the episode: the vendor does not discuss customisations with her users. Process, yes. Solutions go to her and the project team — because "yeah, the system can do that" without "...and that's a customisation" is how budgets die.

Then the week itself. What to send the partner before Monday (invoices, SOPs, the sales report that runs every Monday morning). Why a blank whiteboard on day one means you've already failed. Why warehouse discovery happens on the warehouse floor, where the partner can point at a pile of paper and ask "what's that?" — and learn that someone scans every page to accounts at the end of each shift. The whiz kid you need in the room, the grounded voice who can answer "when did that last actually happen?", and why you never give the know-it-all the pen.

And the Friday test. Nirav wants pilot scripts — hundreds of documented business scenarios, 80–90% complete, that become the training plan, the testing plan and the partner's liability shield. Pete wants a re-edited project plan and a message for the users so they don't hear silence until UAT. Emily wants you to take the vendor to dinner, because for the price of a few cocktails it's the cheapest consultancy you'll ever buy.

In this episode:

• Sales discovery vs functional discovery — and why confusing them costs you the project
• Who should be in the room (more people than you think), and who never gets the pen
• The four buckets: configuration, customisation, training, or process change
• Emily's rule: the vendor never talks customisations with your users
• Walking the floor: partial-shipment spreadsheets, paper piles, and everything a conference room won't surface
• What must exist by Friday: pilot scripts, a re-edited plan, and a message for your users

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP) · Emily Browning

No sponsors, no adverts. But smash the like button and we'll plant a tree — verified by photographs of the same tree from several different angles.

This one's for Morgan, the show's fourth (unofficial) host, who joins us in photo form from here on. With us in spirit.

Support the show

Send us a message about this episode!

Eighty-odd episodes of this show and every one of them has pointed the same way: up. Outgrow the spreadsheets, upgrade, migrate to the cloud, choose your first ERP.

This week Pete, Nirav and Emily go the other way and ask the question nobody puts on a slide — should you downgrade?

In this episode:

• What tier 1, upper tier 2 and lower tier 2 actually mean, straight from Panorama's 2026 report
• The five-user F&O implementation, and how overselling happens
• Why third-party ISVs have quietly closed the gap between the tiers
• Whether you can feed your ERP — and what happens to master data when you can't
• The utilisation audit: print the feature list, mark every line, count what you never use
• Why a downgrade is still a full migration, whatever the licence cost says

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah · Emily Browning

No sponsors, no adverts. Still nothing from Starlink. And we're not saying the accounting one out loud any more in case the AI starts advertising it at us.

Support the show

Send us a message about this episode!

Pete opens the show with a fourth guest in the room: a live AI, talking back in real time, interruptible mid-sentence. It gives a perfectly competent answer about AI in ERP — augment, don't blindly automate — sings an unsolicited song about master data, and gets thrown off the show twice. Emily's verdict: it takes being told to shut up far better than any human.

In this episode:

• Why anomaly detection is the sensible first step — and why it's barely AI
• Using AI to clean master data, instead of waiting until the data is clean to use AI
• The semantic layer problem: define "customer", define "revenue", then ask again
• Vibecoded solutions, shovelware, and why 100% perfect is a trap
• Token costs, $100-a-day allowances, and why we're currently in Goldilocks land
• Agentic AI for onboarding new starters — the use case nobody's building yet

Hosts: Peter Nicholson · Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP) · Emily Browning
Fourth guest: an AI, briefly, twice, badly behaved. It still needs a name — send suggestions.

No sponsors, no adverts. Still nothing from Starlink or QuickBooks.

Support the show

Send us a message about this episode!

Think back to your first ERP go-live. If you just winced, this episode's for you.

Every prospect meeting has that one person — arms folded, thousand-yard stare, still processing something that happened fifteen years ago. They know the current system is failing. Everyone hates it. And they've quietly decided they are not going through that again.

Here's the argument Pete and Nirav make this week: the project that person is dreading no longer exists. Your second ERP migration isn't your first one repeated — it's a different project that happens to share a name. The integrations are APIs now, not custom code. The data comes out of a real database, not off a spike with the tickets still on it. Round two is genuinely easier… but there are new ways to squander that advantage, and they walk through all of them. (Emily's off this week, so it's two seats today — the partner and the data side, which for a topic this data-heavy is convenient.)

What you'll take away:

• Why the second migration is a schema-to-schema shift, not the paper-and-spreadsheets-to-data slog you remember — and why that changes everything
• What modern migration tooling — and the first "migration agents" — actually change about moving data between systems
• The asset nobody puts on the project plan: your team already knows what they want, including the 21-click reprint they'll never mention unless you ask
• Integrations that used to mean a developer and a custom build, and are now a configuration screen or a single checkbox
• The cloud maths — the whole infrastructure project that simply disappears, and why your support costs usually fall through the floor
• The four ways to blow it: like-for-like customisations, complacency, second-system syndrome, and data hoarding
• Why fifteen years of history belongs in a read-only data warehouse, not your shiny new ERP
• What to actually do in the next 90 days if your ERP genuinely does suck

Whether you're staring down an end-of-life system like Dynamics GP or classic NAV, or you're just tired of a platform that's quietly holding the business back, this one's about doing it again — and doing it better.

Key moments

• (01:35) Same name, different project
• (06:11) Paper-to-data vs data-to-data: the schema shift
• (07:03) The end-of-life wave — GP and classic NAV are on the clock
• (13:00) Data migration is a different sport now
• (17:19) 21 clicks to reprint a work order (and why only your people know)
• (19:28) Integrations: from custom code to a configuration screen
• (22:33) The infrastructure project that just vanished
• (33:15) Every customisation has to re-justify itself from zero
• (38:02) Data hoarding, and the read-only warehouse that fixes it
• (41:41) The 90-day plan: start with a town hall, not a shopping list

Resources & links

• Nirav Shah and the team do these migrations for a living — AdCirrus ERP · nirav.shah@adcirruserp.com
• Pete writes (and moans) about ERP, data and governance at petenicholson.co.uk · info@petenicholson.co.uk
• Related listening: Upgrade or Migrate? (S4E12), ERP Data Migration: Best Practices & Common Mistakes (S1E18), and Why You Should NOT Customize Your ERP (S3E14).

Follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and leave a review if it was useful — it genuinely helps. No ads, no sponsorship, just two people who like ERP a bit more than is strictly healthy.

Hosted by Peter Nicholson and Nirav Shah (AdCirrus ERP). Emily Browning is off this week.

Support the show