The problem is ERP needs to be incredibly tightly integrated into the whole business from end-to-end.
You can't only offer raw materials tracking, but not accounting and shipping. There's just not a lot of value to the business unless you have everything coupled.
The MVP for an ERP is essentially, a fully featured and battle-tested system which is very expensive and time consuming to build before it's profitable.
That's strictly true for standard definitions of ERP, but it's a rare enterprise that doesn't already have adjacent software they've licensed to specifically support parts of their business. This could be freight & logistics, or warehouse management/inventory, or QA/Test, or RMA, or whatever. Convincing someone to move away from Oracle or SAP is a nonstarter for a startup. It worked several years ago for Netsuite, which advertised itself as the first "cloud native ERP" and was widely lauded for being so much more easily customizable than Oracle (so Oracle bought them in 2016).
I don't think starting a new ERP company from scratch makes sense for anyone. The best you would likely do is to become either a minor player (just look at the array of CRMs that aren't Salesforce), tailored to a very specific market niche, or an "ERP adjacent" platform of some kind. That last bit is the obvious play. The bread & butter of Enterprise Applications IT departments around the world is to build custom stuff that inherits data from ERPs or feeds data into ERPs and similar mission critical business platforms. Speaking as a guy who ran one of these departments in an F250 for about ten years, most of what they build is pretty crappy.
> The problem is ERP needs to be incredibly tightly integrated into the whole business from end-to-end.
So you target firms that are not yet at the scale where they likely have or need ERP with something that does something they do need that would be integrated into an ERP when they get to that scale and build out from there.
No one is buying an ERP from a firm that doesn't either already have a deep relationship with the buyer or a track record in the ERP space or a track record in an ERP-adjacent space, and more than one of those is desirable, so be in the position that when you start trying to sell an ERP you have at least the last plus a stable of firms for which you also have the first.
Most companies that I know that did it right forked something that was already mostly working, built it in house for a client and then spun it off, or yeah, have billions of dollars and still make a fairly half assed solution.
Ah ok. I'm an interested in this as a topic and would like to take a stab at this as I think it's an almost impossible project. I would like to caveat any opinion first by saying these: I have a great deal of experience customizing and creating little bits of bespoke functionality for various ERP systems (SAP obviously but also some of the smaller ones aimed at niche markets eg construction). I also have similar experience with similarly complicated and sprawling PLM systems. I've spent basically my entire software career around ERP and PLM systems and systems that break out pieces of ERP functionality and try to often do it elsewhere (usually badly), and then usually have to somehow bring everything back into an ERP system anyway, either manually or with at least some level of (but rarely complete) automation.
I am a CS graduate from a 'famous' UK university (UCL). I'm also a qualified CAD engineer, project manager within agile (DSDM agile etc)...ITIL qualified etc. i.e I've spent a lot of time across these kinds of many tentacled systems that really do reach across the entirety of any large business. I've worked with these systems from FTSE 50 businesses to small 50 person manufacturing startups.
I've also been involved in the migration between PLM systems (horrible from a data perspective - all those CAD files etc) and also ERP systems (horrible but largely just the mapping between two different Entity Relationship Diagrams almost incomprehensible to any living human in terms of complexity).
It would be an incredibly ambitious undertaking to compete with one of the major players in either of these spaces. It is not something you could really even do at the scale of a start-up the likes of which YC and the media understand as 'start-up'. You would need so many not just 'early stage' founders with wildly different skillsets, you would need effectively an entire large manufacturing business, from end to end, in terms of personnel because your 'domain expert' essentially includes 'every business function you can imagine'. That's before you could even begin to think about software. It's a fascinating idea but think about it - procurement/purchasing, warehousing and logistics, engineering and design, sales and marketing, finance (very important here), HR, operations, R&D, Q&A...and these are just the ones I can think of that I have come across in my dealings with these systems. They really do touch every department.
The length of time to market would also be such that this kind of project would not really be appropriate to describe as a 'start up'. You'd essentially be creating a 'Unicorn Killer' and that unicorn killer would need insane resources to even have a chance at market success. The number and requirement for specialist migration tools into your new system from existing clients would be a 'massive' undertaking also.
It's such a bold idea but I think to describe an undertaking of that size 'start-up' would be to completely stretch the meaning of the term 'start-up' so far beyond its usage that the term would lose all meaning.
I could see where a startup can solve one of these slices in SaaS form with the intent that it could be also sold as installable via containers on premise or in a private cloud for a customer.
Then do the same for another slice, offer it to existing customers and make the completed slices work well together. Then another slice.
And along the way there could be profit to fund the next slice, as well as existing customers you can tap into to solve their problems. It would be simpler to niche down vs. the SAP/Oracle path of ERP-fits-all.
The days for this to work where back when SAP was young and ERPs the latest dosruptive tech. In order to repeat that, one has to wait for a new technology to replace ERP as a whole, developing a new ERP simply doesn't cut it.
Two approaches I can think of:
1. Target mid market or smaller and grow with customers (will be slow)
2. Take a front-door-wrapper approach