Two Years In: What Real Post Go-Live ERP Support Looks Like for Copper Creek

What does ERP software support look like two years after go-live? And does it look like what was promised during the sales process?

Most of the time, the answer is no. Vendors move on to new implementations. The relationship goes purely reactive. Every new request becomes a billable scope of work. For small and midsized businesses without internal IT, that's the moment the ERP system stops growing with the business.

Copper Creek, a hardware distributor that switched from NetSuite to Stellar One in May 2024, has a different story. Two years in, the relationship is deeper, not shallower. Here's how that’s looked, and what to check for if you're evaluating partners right now.

How Most ERP Support Works After Go-Live

The pattern is consistent across the industry. Implementation partners staff up for the project, deliver to the go-live date, and then quietly shift attention to the next deal. Companies that minimize post-implementation contact see roughly 52 percent lower ROI realization than those who stay actively engaged with their partner.

The reason is both economics and an industry steeped in “the old way.” Most ERP support models bill per ticket or per scope of work, so every question is a transaction. Clients learn quickly that asking for help is expensive and stop asking. Workarounds get baked in. The system drifts further from optimized every quarter. For a company without an internal IT team, that's the worst possible outcome.

Two Years of Mission Support for Copper Creek

From May 2024 through May 2026, Stellar One's Mission Support, or our long-term customer care team, has worked with Copper Creek across operations, warehouse, finance, and customer service. The engagement has covered more than 10 structured working sessions and dozens of individual cases. All four key contacts on Copper Creek's side, including Tae Lee on operations, Stephanie Sanchez on customer service, Nick Doolin in the warehouse, and Fran Uribe in finance, have been part of it.

None of that was a separate scope of work. Every session, every custom build, every iteration came through the Stellar One subscription. As Tae Lee put it after fourteen months on the system: "I've had a little bit more time to get in there and dig around and play with it, so I'm getting more and more comfortable." That kind of comfort doesn't come from a help desk. It comes from a partner who's still around when you need them.

The Custom Work That Came With the Subscription

Over two years, Stellar One built and iterated a custom demand planning tool that pulls live data from Acumatica including in-transit inventory, open POs, and backorders. The team also delivered a fully custom commission results report with Amazon payment reconciliation logic for Fran's finance team, plus packing slip and picking ticket redesigns and a proactive invoice template fix after Stephanie flagged a bulk invoicing trap on credit card orders.

Most ERP partners would have scoped that work as paid change orders, somewhere in the $10,000 to $25,000 range for the commission report alone. Copper Creek paid for none of it separately.

How Issues Get Resolved (and How Fast)

After a structured frustration list session in the first year, Stellar One worked through roughly 25 open items, and 18 of them resolved within 30 days. The remaining seven weren't dropped or buried in a queue. Most were escalated directly to Acumatica's product team for platform-level fixes.

That speed matters. Companies that resolve post go-live issues within thirty days see roughly 40 percent better long-term adoption rates than those where issues linger past ninety. And the tone of resolution matters too. During one working session, Stephanie Sanchez flagged a discount issue and acknowledged it was on Copper Creek's side. Matt Hrabinsky from Stellar One didn't deflect. His response was: "I can load those up for you literally the same day." Client accountability plus vendor responsiveness equals a partnership that works.

Why This Matters Most for Companies Without Internal IT

Copper Creek doesn't have an IT team. The team members and leaders are all non-technical. When Stellar One started the migration project, the team had to learn NetSuite themselves just to pull Copper Creek's own data out of it.

Roughly 67 percent of small and midsized distribution companies have no dedicated IT staff. Companies in that situation spend about 40 percent more on ERP support costs when their partner bills per question, and they're far more likely to end up running on misconfigured systems. The Mission Support model exists for exactly that reality. Custom tool builds happen without internal IT involvement, and knowledge transfer happens over time through working sessions rather than a one-time event at go-live.

What to Look for in an ERP Partner Now

If you're evaluating partners, when you’re asking what’s included in the implementation, you should also ask what happens 12 and 24 months after go-live. Most contracts get vague in exactly that part of the conversation. The ones that don't are the ones worth taking seriously.

Copper Creek's two-year arc shows what real post-implementation support looks like: requested work without separate scopes, issues escalated to the platform vendor rather than buried in a queue, and a partner that absorbs blame even when the client owns the mistake. That model is bundled into the Stellar One subscription along with a 5-Year Price Lock, which means the math works whether you ask one question a month or one a day.

If your current partner has gone quiet, or if you're tired of every email becoming an invoice, that's a signal worth listening to.