ERP Implementation Statistics: What 2159 Published Case Studies Actually Show
ERP Research collected and verified 2159 ERP implementation case studies published by 13 ERP vendors and 633 implementation partners across 162 countries. This page reports what that corpus shows — what companies replaced, how long projects took, and what results get claimed. All figures are original, and free to cite with attribution.
Updated August 2026
Key findings
- 25% were not replacing an ERP at all. The single largest group of ERP buyers in the published record moved off spreadsheets and manual processes (384 of 1534 case studies naming a prior system).
- Median published implementation: 6 months. Half of disclosed projects finished between 3 and 9 months, and 47% claim under six — far faster than independent surveys of ERP projects, because vendors publish their best outcomes, not their average ones.
- The median claimed improvement is 50%. 529 case studies quote a percentage gain; across 886 such claims the middle half sit between 25% and 80%.
- Manufacturing dominates at 28%. With Wholesale & Distribution at 14%, the two account for 42% of every published ERP story.
What companies replace when they buy ERP
Based on 1534 case studies that name the outgoing system.
How long ERP implementations take
Based on 326 case studies that disclose a duration (15% of the corpus).
6 mo
Median
3 mo
25th percentile
9 mo
75th percentile
11%
Over 12 months
Median disclosed duration by vendor
Read this with the bias in mind. These durations come from stories a vendor or partner chose to publish. Projects that overran, got descoped or were abandoned do not appear — so the real distribution is longer and wider than the one above. The gap between this published median and the multi-year programmes described in documented ERP failures is the most useful thing in this dataset.
Who publishes ERP case studies
By industry, normalized across 2159 stories.
By company size
Where a size is stated.
What outcomes get claimed
Stories quoting each outcome type.
Browse the underlying case studies
Every figure on this page is computed from case studies you can read in full, filtered by industry, on each vendor's page.
Methodology
The corpus is 2159 ERP implementation case studies published by ERP vendors and by implementation partners listed in our partner directories. Each story was extracted from its published source, summarised in a neutral editorial voice, and then re-checked against that source page: the customer name, every published figure, and the vendor product must all appear on the page for the story to be included.
Duplicates are resolved per company per vendor. Industry values are normalized to a fixed 20-industry taxonomy; previous systems are grouped into families. Where a field is only partly reported — durations appear in 15% of stories — the sample size is stated next to the figure rather than projected across the whole corpus.
Known limitation: this is a corpus of published success stories. It describes what the ERP industry chooses to show, which is a legitimate object of study, but it is not a random sample of ERP projects and should never be read as one.
Citing this data
These statistics are free to cite and republish with attribution and a link.
ERP Research, “ERP Implementation Statistics: What 2159 Published Case Studies Actually Show” (August 2026). https://www.erpresearch.com/erp-implementation-statistics
Frequently asked questions
How long does an ERP implementation take?
Across 326 case studies that disclose a duration, the median ERP implementation takes 6 months, with the middle half falling between 3 and 9 months. 47% completed in under six months and 11% ran beyond a year. These are vendor- and partner-published projects, so they represent implementations both parties were willing to publicise — treat them as a best case rather than an average.
What do companies use before they implement an ERP system?
Of 1534 case studies that name the previous system, 25% replaced spreadsheets and manual processes rather than another ERP. The most commonly displaced named systems are SAP (10%), Microsoft Dynamics (legacy) (7%), QuickBooks (6%).
Which industries publish the most ERP case studies?
Manufacturing (28%), Wholesale & Distribution (14%), Retail (10%) dominate the published record. Manufacturing and distribution together account for 42% of all case studies in the corpus.
Are these ERP statistics reliable?
Every figure comes from 2159 case studies published by ERP vendors and their implementation partners, each re-checked against its source page before inclusion. The corpus is not a random sample: companies and partners publish successes, not failures, so results skew positive and durations skew short. We publish the sample size behind every number so you can judge it.
Planning your own implementation?
Compare what each ERP costs before you shortlist, and read the case studies behind these numbers.