Remote Work and What It Exposed About Our ERP

March 2020 happened so fast nobody had time to prepare. By March 16th, we were all home, and suddenly three critical things became obvious:

First, which ERP systems were actually accessible remotely. Second, which ones were actually accessible reliably. Third, which companies had backups of anything.

I spent the week watching companies pivot to crisis mode, and the ERP conversations changed overnight from "we're considering a migration" to "our ERP is completely down and nobody can do their job."

The VPN Wasn't Built for This

Most enterprise ERPs were designed with the assumption that users lived in an office. Even the ones that supported remote access didn't expect everyone to be remote at once.

The infrastructure buckled immediately. A company's VPN that could handle 5% remote workers at any given time suddenly needed to handle 100% of the workforce trying to log in simultaneously during peak hours. This wasn't a gradual migration. It was all-or-nothing in days.

We saw VPN timeouts, connection drops that left transactions halfway committed, and database connections that simply wouldn't open because there were no connection pool slots left. Organizations that had invested heavily in traditional enterprise software discovered their infrastructure wasn't built for the reality of modern work.

The cloud-native systems kept working. Not because they were necessarily better engineered, but because they were built assuming distributed users from day one. No VPN bottleneck. No capacity planning based on "office occupancy." Just scale.

Which Companies Actually Had Backups

The conversation about backups changed from theoretical to existential. If your ERP goes down, how do you recover?

Companies with decades of on-premise infrastructure sometimes had backups, but they lived on servers that people couldn't reach. The backup tapes were in the office. The guy who knows how to restore them was also in the office, waiting for this to blow over.

Cloud-based systems had backups by default, replicated across availability zones, with recovery procedures that didn't require anyone to touch physical hardware. The psychological comfort of "your data is safe" meant the difference between measured response and panic.

One company we talked to discovered their backup procedure hadn't actually worked in three years. They had backups being created, but they'd never tested restoration. In normal times, this might've been discovered through a disaster recovery drill. In March 2020, they discovered it when their database corrupted and they had nothing to restore from.

The Spreadsheet Problem (Again)

Here's what I wasn't prepared for: how many businesses were running on spreadsheets alongside their ERP, and how completely those spreadsheets broke down once people were remote.

Finance teams had intricate spreadsheets that pulled data from the ERP every morning. Someone would compile the output, email it to five people, and those five people would make edits that nobody else could see. On Tuesday, an updated version would circulate. On Wednesday, there would be three different versions floating around.

In the office, someone would print them out or huddle around a screen and resolve conflicts. Remotely? It was chaos.

The better ERP systems had built-in reporting and collaboration tools. People could query the system directly. Multiple people could view the same report in real-time. When data changed, everyone saw the change.

But there was this huge gap: most organizations had spent years building workarounds and spreadsheet processes because their ERP's native reporting was either too slow or too inflexible. When suddenly everyone went remote, those workarounds became their single point of failure.

Real-Time Communication Became Critical

Traditional ERP implementations included a lot of synchronous touchpoints. "Meet Monday to reconcile the books." "Audit the week-end close on Friday morning." "Run the month-end reports and review them together."

Remote work didn't eliminate the need for these. It made the communication around them exponentially harder.

Teams that had invested in real-time integration—where different parts of the business could see the same numbers instantly—survived better. Teams that still used "the accounting team sends an email with the numbers and everyone reviews it" ended up with endless back-and-forth and delays.

Suddenly, every organization discovered they needed not just an ERP system but also a way for the ERP to broadcast status and alerts in real-time. Slack integrations became not luxuries but essential infrastructure. Email notifications that took hours to deliver were useless. You needed instant visibility.

The Mobile Question Became Urgent

A lot of business operations require being on-site. Warehouse management. Physical inventory. Equipment maintenance. These don't stop just because there's a lockdown. Someone still has to be there.

The ERPs that had mobile components survived this better than the ones that didn't. Field workers could log in from their phone or tablet. They could see what needed to be done, do it, and have the system updated instantly.

The companies stuck with desktop-only ERP systems faced a choice: buy thousands of laptops for field workers and set up complicated remote desktop access, or hand them printed instructions and have them manually update records later.

Some organizations printed out lists every morning and had people fill in physical forms. Then someone in the office would re-enter that data into the ERP. It was like watching a company operate in 1995, except everything was happening through a locked-down office that only one person could access.

What This Revealed About ERP

By April, a clear pattern had emerged: the ERP systems that survived the sudden shift to remote work had been designed assuming distributed operations from the start. Cloud-first. Mobile-capable. Designed for asynchronous communication and real-time data sharing.

The systems that broke were the ones that had built their entire model around people being in an office, connected through a corporate VPN, during business hours, on a desktop computer.

That doesn't mean the older systems were bad. They were fine—for the world they were designed for. But the world changed faster than anyone expected, and the infrastructure changes exposed everything that was assumption rather than reality.

Which ERP did your organization run on? I bet you know exactly which category it fell into.