Walk into a forty-person component manufacturer and you will find the scheduling on a whiteboard, the inventory in a notebook, and the owner holding the whole system in their head. Every consultant's instinct is to propose an ERP.
The ERP will fail. Not because it is the wrong software, but because there is nobody on site who can run a migration, clean the master data, train the floor, and absorb the disruption while continuing to ship orders. The capability required to adopt the solution exceeds the capability the solution is meant to supply.
What works is smaller. Pick the single bottleneck the owner already complains about. Remove it with the least software that will do the job. Train the two people who will operate it. Leave a runbook. Come back in a quarter.
Under RAMP this is also what the outcome framework rewards, which is unusually well-aligned incentives for a public programme. A measurable improvement in one process beats an ambitious plan that stalls at data migration.
The uncomfortable part is that it makes for a modest case study. We would rather have the modest case study.
LARE Editorial · 6 May 2026