Our Story
The education that money can't buy, but clients keep paying for.
There is a certain kind of wisdom that can only be acquired by spending 35 years sitting in every chair in the room — including some of the chairs you later wish you hadn't.
It starts, as most things do, with accounting. A Chartered Accountant by training, the founder of Solven Advisory entered the technology world through the unglamorous but clarifying lens of cost accounting, shop floor operations, and supply chain — the part of a business where the numbers either work or they very visibly don't. This turned out to be an excellent preparation for a career in ERP, which is, at its core, a discipline about whether the numbers work or very visibly don't.
What followed was a 35-year tour of the ERP ecosystem that covered approximately every vantage point available. Big Four selection consulting: where you learn to evaluate software with rigour and recommend it with confidence. Implementation partner: where you learn what actually happens after the confident recommendation. Presales consulting: where you learn to speak fluently about what software will do, typically in rooms where the software has not yet been asked to prove it. And then, for nineteen years, CEO of a two-country ERP practice — which is where you learn everything the other roles had politely omitted.
Somewhere along the way, a milestone that was either a great honour or a warning sign: the world's first Microsoft Dynamics F&SCM MVP. It is a distinction held with genuine pride and cited with complete transparency, because in this practice, the history of where the expertise came from is part of what makes the independence meaningful.
Here is what three and a half decades of that education produces: a precise and detailed map of who earns what, when, and why — and a clear-eyed understanding of whose interests are aligned with yours at any given moment in a technology project. The answer, with uncomfortable frequency, is: not many people's. The vendor wants the subscription. The implementation partner wants the change order. The internal team wants to survive the politics. The person signing the cheques wants the project to work — and tends to discover, usually around month eight, that this particular interest is not as widely shared as the kickoff presentation implied.
That structural observation is what Solven Advisory was built to address. Not because the vendors and partners are villains — most of them are not — but because no one can be fully honest when their revenue depends on a particular answer. It is not a character flaw. It is arithmetic.
The Solven solution is equally simple: fixed fees, complete independence, no financial relationship with any party in the supply chain, and a contractual obligation — stated in writing before work begins — to say what is true rather than what is convenient.
The practice does not promise miracles. ERP implementations are genuinely hard. But they fail far less often when someone in the room is paid to notice the things that everyone else has a financial incentive not to see.
That is the story. That is the practice.
Why you need us
The number that should bother everyone in the room: 94 percent of CFOs, surveyed in 2025, said they regret their ERP implementation. Not a few. Not a vocal minority. Nearly all of them.
This is not a software problem. The software, in most cases, is perfectly capable of doing what it was purchased to do. This is a decision problem — a long series of them, made under pressure, often without the experience to know which decisions are the dangerous ones.
After 35 years working in and around ERP implementations — as a controller, end-user, ERP buyer, Big Four selection consultant, implementation practitioner, presales consultant, a CEO of a two-country ERP practice for nearly 19 years, and also a seller — the pattern is well established. Projects don't fail in one dramatic moment. They fail in accumulated increments: a scope that was never properly defined, a business case built on optimistic assumptions, a go-live date chosen for political rather than practical reasons, a steering committee receiving progress reports that have been tidied up before they arrived.
And frequently — more often than most executives want to hear — the client organisation is part of the problem. Not through any fault of character, but through the entirely human tendency to underestimate how much the business needs to change to make the technology work. ERP doesn't fail because the software is wrong. It fails because the organisation wasn't ready, wasn't honest with itself about its own complexity, or made a series of small compromises that individually seemed reasonable and collectively became fatal.
Recognising that dynamic — and saying so, plainly, while there is still time to do something about it — is one of the most valuable things an experienced independent advisor can do. It is also one of the rarest. Most people in the room have reasons to keep the conversation comfortable.
What Solven Advisory does is navigate the specifics. Is the original business case still intact, or has scope creep quietly dismantled it? Are the reported timelines credible, or is the project running on optimism? Is the go-live date a genuine target or a number that has become politically impossible to move — right up until it becomes impossible not to? Are the change management and training plans actually going to land with the people who will use this system every day? And critically: is this ERP implementation building toward the AI-enabled future the business needs — or inadvertently locking it out?
These are not comfortable questions. They are, however, the right ones. Asked early enough, they create options. Asked too late, they become the debrief.
This practice is built on fixed fees, complete independence, and a contractual commitment to tell clients what is true rather than what is convenient. The credentials — The world's first Microsoft Dynamics F&SCM MVP. A qualified Chartered Accountant. 35 years across every seat at the table — exist to make sure that when the hard questions get asked, the answers are grounded in genuine experience rather than educated guesswork.
The goal, in every engagement, is simple: don't become a statistic.
The goal in every engagement is simple. Don't let our client become a statistic
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