About Us
Our reason for existing
ERP implementations fail at a rate that should embarrass everyone involved. Between 55 and 75 percent do not deliver what was promised. Cost overruns average 189 percent of budget. And yet the same structural conditions that produced those outcomes are replicated, faithfully, on project after project — because the incentives that drive them are never addressed. Every expert at the table earns more when the project is larger and longer. Nobody at that table — not the vendor, not the implementation partner, not the system integrator — has a financial interest in your project succeeding efficiently. That is not an accusation. It is arithmetic. And it is the specific gap that Solven Advisory was built to occupy.
What we actually do is sit on your side of the table — contractually, financially, and structurally — and tell you the truth. That means identifying risk before it becomes a crisis, asking the questions that are awkward to ask when everyone else in the room is on the clock, and being willing to tell you when the problem is not your implementation partner but your own organisation's readiness. It means reading the change orders with genuine scepticism, watching the project health signals that the steering committee reports tend to quietly omit, and making sure the system you go live on actually does what you were promised it would do. We charge a fixed fee, we take no money from any other party in the ecosystem, and we have no interest whatsoever in your engagement lasting a day longer than it needs to. That combination — deep experience, complete independence, and an incentive structure that is entirely aligned with your outcome — is what makes this practice unusual. And, if we are being frank about it, necessary.
Our Independence Pledge
Solven Advisory takes no referral fees, no vendor commissions, and no payments of any kind from implementation partners, software vendors, or any other party in the supply chain of the projects we advise on. We hold no equity interest in any product a client may be advised to purchase, and we maintain no certifications that require a commercial relationship with a software company. This is not a policy — it is a contractual commitment, written into every engagement letter before work begins.
The reason is simple: the moment we have a financial interest in a particular outcome, we are no longer independent, and our independence is the entire value. Every credential we bring to the table, the deep ERP experience, the process engineering background, the decades at every seat at the table, is available somewhere in the market if you search hard enough. Genuine independence at this level of expertise is not. That is what we protect, absolutely, in every engagement.
Use of AI
Solven Advisory uses artificial intelligence extensively and deliberately across every engagement. AI is not a novelty here — it is a core part of how we deliver senior-level advisory at a pace and depth that would otherwise require a much larger team. In practice, this means continuous project health monitoring, real-time document analysis, risk pattern recognition across large volumes of project data, change order evaluation, and the production of board-ready reporting — all running in the background, all the time. The result is that our clients get the analytical output of a well-resourced advisory team, with the judgment and accountability of a senior practitioner who has actually read everything the AI has surfaced. We use AI because the alternative — slower, shallower, more expensive — is not good enough for the stakes involved in a major ERP implementation.
We are equally deliberate about how AI is used. No client data is used to train third-party models. No confidential project information, commercially sensitive material, or personally identifiable data is submitted to public AI systems. We work exclusively with enterprise-grade AI platforms that meet current privacy and data protection standards, and our use of these tools is governed by the same independence and confidentiality principles that apply to every other aspect of our practice. When AI surfaces a finding, a senior advisor validates it. When AI produces a deliverable, a senior advisor owns it. The technology accelerates and deepens our work — it does not replace the judgment, the experience, or the accountability that our clients are paying for.