The 2025 ERP Today Awards made one thing clear: Successful system deployment is sometimes the easy part. What truly tests ERP leadership is what comes after—not implementation, but turning data, automation, and platforms into measurable business outcomes.
Across the winners and finalists, a consistent pattern emerged. The strongest projects did not treat ERP as infrastructure. They used it to drive customer engagement, operational performance, compliance, resilience, and transformation at scale.
A webinar organized by ERP Today with several award winners and finalists sharpened that conclusion. The panelists spoke less about go-lives and more about the work that made their projects stick: trust, data ownership, user adoption, business confidence, and measurable changes in how people actually work.
The Results
The 2025 award results are:
Customer Experience Solution of the Year
- Winner: SugarAI
- Finalist: Inetum
Operational Innovation of the Year
- Winner: Inetum
- Finalist: Solvoz
ERP AI and Innovation of the Year
- Winner: IFS
- Finalist: Sovos
SMB Transformation Project of the Year
- Winner: Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Service
- Finalist: Venture
Large Enterprise Transformation Project of the Year
- Winner: Zalaris
- Finalist: Onapsis
Below is a full breakdown of the winners and finalists by category, with added insights from the 2025 awards panel.
Customer Experience Solution of the Year
Customer experience (CX) has moved into the core of ERP strategy. CX is becoming part of day-to-day enterprise operations, with customer data informing sales, service, inventory, and fulfillment decisions inside the systems where work already happens.
SugarAI won for its work with Country Fare, transforming fragmented sales data into a unified, actionable customer view. The system enabled real-time insights into behavior and preferences, allowing sales teams to move from reactive processes to proactive engagement strategies.
Becca Toth, Chief Marketing Officer at SugarAI, said the biggest impact was “turning data into action.” Country Fare, she said, could “spot changes in customer buying behavior before they became lost accounts,” helping drive 21% company growth, a 40% increase in revenue from existing customers, and a 20% reduction in time previously spent pulling together manual reports.
The more important sign of success was behavioral. “The real turning point for them wasn’t just the numbers,” Toth said. “It was when they saw our solution become part of the team’s daily sales conversations.”
She added that sales reps were able to identify at-risk customers and new opportunities with more confidence. “That’s when they knew the solution had really become an essential part of how they sell, not just a piece of technology.”
Inetum was recognized as runner-up for its AI-driven service delivery optimization project for a global FMCG organization, improving workload management, reducing backlogs, and accelerating response times in high-volume environments. Judges emphasized the practical impact on service operations, particularly how AI-driven prioritization improved response times and day-to-day execution.
Analysis
What this means: Customer experience is a key operational function inside ERP. The SugarAI and Inetum submissions show that customer insight only becomes valuable when it changes how teams prioritize work, manage risk, and act in daily workflows. In 2026, the strongest CX submissions will need to show how customer data changes behavior, not just how dashboards improve visibility.
Operational Innovation of the Year
Operational innovation is expanding beyond traditional enterprise environments, with ERP being applied to new sectors and increasingly complex operating models.
Inetum won for its SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud implementation with Erri Berri, replacing fragmented systems with a unified platform spanning budgeting, planning, and operational reporting. The project stood out for its speed and execution, completing in a compressed timeline while delivering measurable improvements in process accuracy and efficiency.
Judges pointed to the combination of speed, disciplined execution, and measurable efficiency gains as evidence of a scalable, real-world transformation. Kathy Quashie, EVP and CEO, Inetum Growing Markets, described the project as proof that “disciplined execution and speed can go hand-in-hand.”
Solvoz earned runner-up recognition for Mawared MENA, a procurement platform that digitizes sourcing and purchasing processes in humanitarian environments, improving transparency and decision-making in resource-constrained settings.
During the webinar, Claire Barnhoorn, Founder and CEO of Solvoz, put the project into operational context. In humanitarian and development environments, she said, procurement can represent “65% to 80% of organizational spend.” With needs rising faster than funding, procurement becomes one of the clearest places to improve outcomes.
The harder problem is fragmentation. Barnhoorn said traditional systems often assume organizations already know their suppliers and procurement processes. “In crisis environments, or in humanitarian deployments, that assumption doesn’t often hold,” she said. Suppliers can be hard to identify, procurement teams work under extreme time pressure, and transparency requirements are high.
For Solvoz, the goal was not simply to digitize a process for one organization. It was to create shared market infrastructure. “The real success is not if the technology works,” Barnhoorn said. “The real test is, have people changed the way they work because of it?”
Analysis
What this means: Visibility, trust, and behavior change define operational maturity. Inetum’s Erri Berri project shows the value of disciplined execution inside a cloud ERP program, while Solvoz shows how structured procurement can create impact across an ecosystem. In 2026, operational innovation entries will stand out by proving that technology changed execution in the real operating environment, not just inside the implementation plan.
ERP AI and Innovation of the Year
AI in ERP has shifted from experimentation to embedded execution, with leading vendors integrating intelligence directly into core platforms.
IFS won for IFS.ai, a platform that embeds AI across asset management, service, and manufacturing operations. The solution stood out for integrating AI into the core system rather than layering it externally, enabling predictive maintenance, optimized service delivery, and improved operational decision-making.
Judges were impressed by the depth of AI integration across the platform, demonstrating enterprise-wide impact rather than isolated use cases.
“Unlike generic AI tools, IFS.ai is engineered for the industries that keep the world running, from energy and aerospace to manufacturing and field service,” Cathie Hall, Chief Customer Officer at IFS, told ERP Today. “This award reflects our continued commitment to building industrial AI that creates measurable impact for asset-intensive businesses.”
Sovos was named runner-up for its real-time tax compliance platform, which provides continuous visibility into global regulatory obligations, applying rules at the point of transaction and reducing reliance on post-process reconciliation.
Judges highlighted the solution’s immediate applicability in a complex domain, delivering continuous compliance visibility without adding process friction.
“Navigating global tax compliance is the most sophisticated technology challenge facing multinational businesses today,” said Kevin Akeroyd, CEO of Sovos. “The pace of change, complexity, and necessity to respond in real time or face significant penalties has companies reacting versus planning strategically.”
Analysis
What this means: AI differentiation is shifting from features to architecture. IFS and Sovos show two sides of the same trend: AI is becoming more valuable when it is embedded into industry-specific workflows, whether in asset-intensive operations or real-time tax compliance. In 2026, AI submissions will need to show where intelligence sits in the operating model and how it improves decisions at scale.
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SMB Transformation Project of the Year
Transformation at the SMB level is proving that scale is not the defining factor. Impact is.
The Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Service (EPSS) won for its digital transformation of Ethiopia’s pharmaceutical supply chain, replacing fragmented systems with a coordinated, data-driven platform. The initiative improved visibility into inventory, demand, and distribution, strengthening access to essential medicines across the country.
During the webinar, Dr. Abdulkedir Gelgelo, Director General of EPSS, said the organization’s mandate is to procure, store, and distribute medicine to more than 5,000 health facilities across Ethiopia. Before the transformation, he said, much of the supply chain relied on manual processes, with inventory, finance, and HR running in fragmented systems.
The case for transformation was not abstract. “If we don’t automate this system, there will be product out of stock,” Gelgelo said. “Mothers and children won’t be getting needed supplies.”
EPSS implemented SAP nationwide in 2022 under a project called SMILE. Gelgelo said the initiative moved core process automation from a low baseline to roughly 70% and required sustained change management, stakeholder engagement, training, and leadership commitment.
“The software made 75% of automation possible,” he said. “But the change management is what made it real.”
Venture was recognized for its work with Biffa, aligning operational improvements with sustainability goals through better visibility, coordination, and process standardization. In the webinar, Rob Mathieson, Co-Founder and Consulting Director at Venture, said Biffa had been operating on a mainframe system that went live in 1992, with complex financial processing across 70 legal entities.
The business case, he said, came down to visibility. Biffa needed better insight into financial performance, regulatory compliance, supply chain, and sustainability. But the project also reinforced a lesson that ran through the full panel.
“Implementing technology is almost relatively the easy piece,” Mathieson said. “What’s harder is the data migration, the adoption, the change management, and the human element.”
Analysis
What this means: Transformation strategy goes beyond efficiency into societal, environmental, and public-service outcomes. EPSS shows how ERP-led transformation can support national health infrastructure, while Venture’s Biffa project shows how modernization can strengthen sustainability and financial control. In 2026, SMB transformation entries will be judged less on organizational size and more on ambition, execution quality, and broader business or societal impact.
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Large Enterprise Transformation Project of the Year
At the enterprise level, transformation is defined by the ability to manage complexity at scale without disrupting operations.
Zalaris won for modernizing Ryanair’s payroll system, creating a unified, scalable platform that improved visibility, compliance, and operational control across a large international workforce.
Sandra Fallon, Head of Payroll at Ryanair, said that Ryanair entered its partnership with Zalaris in 2023 and has since moved 10 European countries into SAP, covering more than 12,000 employees and bringing payroll operations into a centralized Dublin environment for the first time.
The problem was data ownership and scale. Ryanair had used payroll bureaus across different European countries, and Fallon said the team “never really felt that [they] owned [their] own data.” Much of the work still depended on spreadsheets, and the previous system could not keep pace with growth.
That changed how the business viewed payroll. The centralized model, Fallon said, was “a game changer” in helping Ryanair deliver accurate payroll on time. She also noted that Ryanair now has greater confidence to bring more payroll operations under the same umbrella.
Neil Worthy, Senior Project Manager at Zalaris, said the project depended on trust and standardization. “Payroll’s obviously a key thing for employees,” he said. “Employees need to trust that payroll’s going to work.”
Onapsis was named runner-up for its security-led transformation approach, embedding protection and compliance directly into ERP environments to strengthen resilience and business continuity. Judges highlighted the strategic role of security in enabling transformation, positioning risk management as a core business capability.
“Our Secure RISE Accelerator helps reduce risk and remove security and compliance barriers, enabling enterprises to complete their transformations on time and in budget without compromising security,” said Sadik Al-Abdulla, Chief Product Officer at Onapsis.
Analysis
What this means: Enterprise transformation includes trust, resilience, and security as design principles. Zalaris and Ryanair show how standardization can strengthen payroll accuracy and data ownership across a complex workforce, while Onapsis shows why ERP security is now part of transformation success. In 2026, large enterprise entries will need to show that scale did not come at the expense of control.
The Bigger Picture
ERP is no longer evaluated on implementation success alone. Across all categories, the 2025 results show the next phase of ERP is defined by embedded intelligence, operational execution, measurable business outcomes, and the ability to make change stick.
The 2025 award winners and finalists repeatedly returned to the same themes—start with the business problem, protect focus, invest in change management, free up the right people, and measure whether the organization works differently after the project.
Toth said the strongest projects start with the business problem, not the technology. The most compelling stories, she said, are not only about software or metrics, but about “the moment when the organization starts behaving differently.”
Barnhoorn made a similar point about AI. “I don’t think it’s enough to talk about AI alone,” she said. “It’s not the story. The real question is if the technology can change how decisions are made.”
Worthy summed up the execution discipline behind successful transformation: “What’s the core thing that I’m trying to achieve? What am I trying to make better? You can focus on many different things, but there’s got to be a limited number of core aims. Without that, you’ll lose focus.”
For ERP vendors, partners, and enterprise leaders, the bar has moved from deployment to impact. The projects that stand out now are the ones that prove technology actually changed the business after the system went live.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on 5/4 and updated on 7/8 to update 2026 nomination details and include comments from the awards webinar panelists.
