About The Book

The Big Commitment: Solving the Mysteries of Your ERP Implementation

“No, there was no shortage of security in place at the Carter Supply compound, but none of these features could stop what happened in the darkest hours of that night in early January.”

If you read that quote on the cover flap of the next Tom Clancy novel, you’d be excited to solve his newest mystery. You’d be surprised that the above quote comes from a “business” book. The Big Commitment is the new novel from The Vested Group founder Joel Patteson. After years of holistic enterprise resource planning (ERP) software implementation for cloud-based businesses, Joel and his team have encountered countless implementation mysteries and learned valuable lessons along the way. 

Businesses have much to gain from ERP services like Oracle+NetSuite, but the program’s licensing, implementation, and support are not always simple tasks. And piecing the clues together to solve implementation problems is enough to overwhelm many leaders. In an effort to bring clarity to ERP implementation process and strategy, Patterson created The Big Commitment as a case study highlighting the people, problems, and solutions that make-up his hard-boiled corporate mystery narrative.

Weaving an educational and entertaining tale of a technology consultant and client as they work together to fix a mysterious glitch in the implementation, Patterson’s story unfolds in three parts, detailing the mystery, the deepening plot at the heart of the conflict, and ultimately a resolution rooted in trust and commitment across teams and partnerships. 

“I wanted to come up with a complete final product that carried our message and conveyed the necessary information,” Patterson says. “But in a way that was still entertaining and which busy people wouldn’t find as a chore, but rather more of a treat.”

While big on intrigue, The Big Commitment also offers readers a layman-friendly explanation of enterprise resource planning systems. The novel shows how utilizing these systems can offer businesses an integrated and upgraded view of their core business processes and enable them to collect, store, manage, and analyze data from these many business activities in a way that will position them to maximize overall performance across a wide array of metrics.

Comedic mystery and human interest elements are more than the spoonfuls of sugar that makes Patterson’s message easy to appreciate; they speak to the spirit of innovation and the teaming culture that fuels Patterson and his company, The Vested Group. 

Open your copy of The Big Commitment: Solving the Mysteries of Your ERP Implementation today and enjoy the ride.