Direction
Knowing which of the ten plausible solutions is the one this business can actually run.
About MR10
15+ years working with ERP systems.One conclusion.
For most of that time the answer was to reshape the company around the software. That is no longer the only option, and it is rarely the best one.
Career
The route here
Marten Nijboer, from controlling, to the customer side of an ERP programme, to architecting them.
2007 – 2012
Controlling
Assistant controller, then business controller at an international manufacturer. Monthly closes, a cost price system built and kept current, and the financial input on the product development team's business cases. Where it becomes clear what the numbers on a report actually represent on a factory floor.
2012 – 2016
Controller, and the customer side of an ERP programme
Head of finance for the Dutch and German entities of an industrial group, responsible for the financial landscape of a new ERP system and the business intelligence layer behind it. The first ERP programme, seen from the customer's side of the table, which is the side that has to live with the result.
2016 – 2022
ERP implementation consultant
The other side of the table. Six years implementing ERP as lead project management consultant, grid operators, offshore and subsea contractors, technical services, biotechnology. Enough implementations to see the pattern: the technical work is rarely what decides whether a programme lands.
2022 – 2023
Solution architect, presales
Translating what prospects and customers asked for into solutions across projects, finance and HR, and acting as spokesperson for value engineering, the business case made at the start and then followed through into the live application, rather than filed once the deal closes.
2023 – today
Business architect
Construction and engineering: the business case, the architecture, and demonstrating what a solution will actually do for a company. Guest lecturer at Utrecht University since 2024.
2025 – today
MR10
Business architecture and software development, the same discipline, without the constraint that everything has to be bent to fit a product someone else designed. The first product built on it is Tuindirigent: a platform where consumers and gardeners pick plants with the help of AI, and can apply a design of their own just as easily.
The shift
The software market genuinely changed
The equation used to be fixed: standard software was affordable and rigid, bespoke software was flexible and out of reach. So you fitted the company to the process the product imposed, and paid for it in change management. Modern AI tooling has moved that line. Building a solution shaped around how a company already works is now realistic for organisations that could never have justified it before, and getting something wrong costs far less, because you no longer have to specify everything up front.
- Less change management
- The software bends to the business, so fewer people have to unlearn how they work.
- Built in increments
- Something usable early, extended as you learn, instead of a two-year specification.
- Modern tooling, used deliberately
- The most capable AI development tooling available, applied where it pays off rather than everywhere.
The catch
AI writes brilliant solutions. To the wrong problem.
The bottleneck moved. It is no longer how fast software can be written.
Give a modern model a vague requirement and it will hand you something impressive, coherent and subtly wrong, built on assumptions nobody stated and nobody checked. It does not need more capability. It needs direction and it needs context, and both have to come from someone who understands the business well enough to supply them.
Context
The process, the data model and the systems already in place, supplied up front, not discovered halfway through.
Judgement
15+ years of seeing which decisions age well and which ones become next year's migration project.
Where I come in
What that means for your company
Business requirements translated into software that is efficient to build and cheap to change.
- From requirement to solution
- I take what the business needs (stated in its own language) and turn it into something a development process can build efficiently. Most wasted budget is spent building the wrong thing correctly.
- Steering the build
- AI-assisted development moves fast in whatever direction it is pointed. I keep it pointed at the business outcome, with the context it needs to make sound choices.
- Change your people can absorb
- The solution grows in increments around how you already work, so adoption does not become a separate programme with its own budget.
- A solid foundation underneath
- The platform rests on a proven technology partner and a modern stack rather than on something improvised, so what gets built stays maintainable long after the first release.
Get in touch
Tell us what you are trying to solve
One conversation is usually enough to tell whether we can help, and if we cannot, we will say so.
- Direct contact
- You speak with the person who will do the work.
- Your language
- We work in Dutch and English.
- No obligation
- A first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.