Fixed price is not a discount. It is a discipline.

Nearly every ERP proposal request we receive asks for a fixed price. The reason is sound: the buyer has heard the stories, and wants the risk on the supplier's side of the table.

Then the project starts, and within six weeks it is running on change requests.

Why it usually fails

A fixed price is only meaningful if the thing being priced is fixed. Most fixed-price ERP projects are priced against a scope written before anyone looked at the client's actual processes — a list of modules, not a list of decisions.

The gap between "we will implement Finance" and "we will implement these seventeen process variants, with this chart of accounts, at these three legal entities" is where every overrun lives.

A fixed price agreed before the design stage is not a commitment. It is a guess with a signature on it.

What has to be true first

For a fixed price to hold, four things have to exist on paper before anyone commits to a number:

1. Process decisions, made. Not "we will decide during realisation." Fit-to-standard workshops run to a decision, with a named business owner signing each one.
2. Data quality, assessed. Migration is the most reliably underestimated line in ERP work. You cannot price cleaning data you have not looked at.
3. Integration inventory, complete. Every interface, its owner, its protocol, and whether the system on the other end has anyone maintaining it.
4. Change control, agreed in advance. What counts as a change, who prices it, who approves it, and how long approval takes.

Miss the fourth and the other three erode within a month.

The client's half of the bargain

This is the part suppliers rarely say plainly: most of what makes a fixed price hold is on the client's side.

• Key users have to be released from their day jobs for workshops. Not "when they have time."
• Decisions need a decision-maker, available inside days rather than weeks.
• Someone senior has to be willing to say no to good ideas that arrive after scope is closed.

A supplier who does not tell you this before signing is managing their sales process, not your risk.

How we handle it

We price the discovery and design stages, and we fix the build price at the end of design — not before. That means the number you approve is based on decisions already made rather than on assumptions.

It also means we occasionally tell a client the project is larger than they hoped, at a point where they can still choose not to proceed. That conversation is uncomfortable and much cheaper than the alternative.