This article was originally published in the Business Post in September 2026 as part of their Enterprise Resource Planning report. Read the original article here.
Last Updated: 11th September 2026
Author: Munyaradzi O’ Keeffe, Head of Service Operations, Datapac
The reputation of ERP has not kept pace with the reality
Irish organisations have grown comfortable with the cloud. Email, file storage, collaboration and increasingly even finance and accounting now run as subscription services that most would not consider bringing back in-house. Yet when the conversation turns to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), an older reputation takes hold. It is still widely regarded as something built for large enterprises, delivered over long timelines at a cost that is difficult to pin down in advance.
Much of this comes down to a perception gap, and it goes a long way toward explaining low adoption among small and mid-sized organisations. In many cases, the last time an organisation seriously reviewed their use of an ERP, there was no realistic way for it to make sense. That impression anchored, and it has not moved with the market since. The result is that a great many organisations still weigh ERP against what it involved years ago, rather than what it involves today.
Modern cloud ERP has transformed what adoption involves
The change over the past decade is difficult to overstate. ERP has gone from a prospect many organisations could not realistically contemplate to one they can scope, stand up and begin drawing value from within a remarkably short space of time. With a cloud platform such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, there is no server to procure or maintain, licensing becomes a predictable subscription, and much of the implementation can be delivered remotely. The work moves quickly, and it starts where the value is greatest, so an organisation sees a genuine return early.
The groundwork that makes AI worth the investment
There is real pressure on every organisation to show progress on the use of AI tools, and that ambition is well placed. What is less often said is that the use of AI tools is only ever as good as its data foundations. The organisations that get the most from these tools are those whose information is already connected, consistent and trustworthy, because that is what the technology draws on.
When a finance team still assembles the monthly picture from an accounting package and a sprawl of manually updated spreadsheets, that foundation is not yet there. AI applied to a fragmented picture does not simply underperform, it produces seemingly confident answers from an incomplete base, which in an operational or financial setting is more dangerous than no answer at all. A well-implemented ERP is what brings that information into a single, reliable core. Getting that core right is what turns AI use from an aspiration into something an organisation can genuinely act on.
Understanding your position before committing to a platform
The most useful first step is not choosing a system, but understanding where the organisation actually stands. An engagement with one of our ERP specialists reviews what the organisation wants to achieve, and whether its current systems are getting in the way, allowing for an honest conversation about whether a new ERP system is the right answer. Datapac works with organisations to carry out exactly that assessment, giving leadership a clear and objective picture before any decision is made.
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