I can answer number 2. The closer you stick to "out the box" ERP the more chance you actually have of moving off of it in the future. Any ERP consulting house

I can answer number 2. The closer you stick to "out the box" ERP the more chance you actually have of moving off of it in the future. Any ERP consulting house worth their fee will know how to move customers from one standard ERP system to their own/another. The difficulties come when you heavily modify your ERP solution to fit your business rather then follow the advice given. This is where the tender process and requirements will bog down, developers need to be hired or entire business processes need to be rediscovered and rewitten. Since an ERP move might only happen once every 10/15/20 years a lot of business will use the project as an opportunity to reshape business processes, removing a lot of legacy stuff which no longer makes sense.