ERP specifications translate business requirements into clear functional and technical documentation that guides system selection and implementation. Dreher Consulting develops the specification independently — precise, complete and aligned to real operational needs — so vendors can be held to exactly what your business agreed to buy.
Creating an ERP requirements specification is one of the most critical steps in any ERP selection. A high-quality specification provides a clear picture of your business goals — linking customer focus, process efficiency and data quality — and lays the foundation for a successful implementation.
When the specification is vague or incomplete, problems only surface later — often when the project is already off track. In our projects we are regularly called in at exactly that stage, to stabilise and realign ERP projects that have lost direction or run over budget. A good specification maps your business model of tomorrow: requirements that are effective today and stay effective as the company grows.
A quick read before you spend a meeting on it. If most of this matches your situation, an independent specification is worth scoping — if it doesn't, we will say so.
You are heading into an ERP selection and need a vendor-ready specification
Requirements sit decentralised across the business units and need consolidating
Your processes need defining — or optimising — before a system is chosen
Management wants requirements that hold up in vendor negotiations
Access to the process owners in each business unit
Your data — above all the master data — for the quality analysis
A decision-maker with authority over requirements and weighting
Strategic guidelines: growth plans, channels, known constraints
Beware selection tools that filter on a handful of criteria, and platforms that are paid for their recommendations or endorsed by software providers — their interest is placement, not fit. We take no software revenue and no referral fees, so our only interest is a specification that holds the vendor to your processes: current and future, defined clearly enough to be accepted against.
We create the foundations so the requirements from process management can be represented — using the latest tools for data analysis and process mining, with your business units at the table.
ACTUAL processes captured with process mining, and your data analysed for quality — above all the master data — so requirements are written against reality, not assumption.
Process miningRequirements developed together with your business units through systematic requirement engineering — process-first, across the whole value chain.
Requirement engineeringEvery requirement weighted, then tested for correlations and causal relationships — so the individual requirements do not contradict each other.
Logic testingText and graphics consolidated into a vendor-ready specification: a quick, comprehensive overview of your requirements and the process model.
Vendor-readyERP consultants experienced in your industry — as your direct contacts throughout.
Your existing processes recorded fast with modern process-mining software and data-analysis tools.
The specification’s requirements created together with the people who run the processes.
Requirements scattered across departments consolidated into one coherent document.
Quality assurance on every requirement: weighting plus causal and contradiction logic testing.
Requirements in the context of interfaces — defined up front, not discovered in configuration.
Requirements and documentation for workflows and approval procedures.
Concepts for the use of the new ERP software, including initial rights management.
Consulting in the context of optimising the underlying business processes.
Martini Sportswear · Retail & Distribution
ProblemA growing collection business with seasonal peaks, variant-heavy products and both wholesale and retail channels — and requirements scattered across business units, too important to trust to a web tool’s criteria.
EngagementIndependent selection advisory on a Dreher-built specification: ACTUAL processes captured, requirements engineered with the business units, quality-assured with weighting and logic testing — and carried into the vendor negotiations.
1
process model — today’s and tomorrow’s business in one document
0
fees from software vendors — no referral, no commission
1,200+
projects of pattern recognition behind the method · since 1992
“For 15 years we have been working with Dreher Consulting on various tasks in the context of process optimisation. We have achieved all our goals and will work with Dreher Consulting again.”
Honest answers about specifications, requirement engineering and vendor neutrality — the questions that come up in nearly every first conversation about a requirements specification.
Answers by
Dr. Harald Dreher
Founder · Dreher Consulting
Since 1992 he has guided Mittelstand companies through replacing in-house-built ERP systems. He advises vendor-neutrally, taking no commission from any software vendor.
LinkedIn · Last updated: 21 July 2026
An ERP specification — the Lastenheft — translates business requirements into clear functional and technical documentation for system selection and implementation. It maps the processes the new system must support, today’s and tomorrow’s, links them to data and interface requirements, and gives vendors a precise, verifiable picture of what your business is buying. It is the reference document offers are compared against — and milestones are later accepted against.
Because the specification defines what vendors are held to. Written by a vendor — or by a platform that is paid for its recommendations — it drifts toward what the software offers, not what your processes need. Dreher Consulting takes no software revenue and no referral fees; our only interest is a specification that holds the vendor to your processes.
A good specification maps your business model of tomorrow as a process model — not an endless Excel list of functions. It gives the future software supplier a quick, comprehensive overview of your requirements and the process model without getting lost in detail, and it scales with the business as it grows. Function lists capture what exists; process models capture what the business needs.
From our experience, yes. Process mining captures the ACTUAL processes — as they run, not as they are believed to run — and the master-data analysis shows whether the new system will stand on clean data. Without both, requirements are written against assumptions, and the gaps surface later in the project, priced as change.
It depends on the number of processes, business units and interfaces involved. In our projects, Mittelstand specifications typically take a few weeks to a few months; process mining and data analysis accelerate the ACTUAL capture considerably. The time is recovered in the selection and the implementation, where a precise specification prevents the expensive loops.
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