Impossible Designs: ERPs and Empty Stadiums

The stadium is the public center of a team, where players and fans meet and visibility is at its peak. A dumpy stadium leads to negative fan experience, but even an old stadium can consistently deliver positive fan experience. Fenway Park was opened in 1912 and, despite (or because of) its obstructed views and historical quirks, has been regarded as one of the jewels of the MLB.¹

In baseball, newer is usually better, but better is not the same as fixed, as evidenced by the lack of public embrace that loanDepot park has experienced since opening in 2012. The Marlins moved from what was then known as Sun Life Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins, into a brand new baseball-specific stadium.² It had some novel engineering features when it was designed, the retractable roof offers relief from the South Florida sun and features like the home run sculpture or aquariums behind home plate offered a unique fan experience. Except there are no fans. The Marlins have never sold out loanDepot park (only six games ever came within 3% of full capacity over 1,049) and routinely rank at or near the bottom of attendance.³

In 2003 the Marlins drew 16,290 a game across the season in the old park (28th in MLB), then filled it with 65,975 for Game 5 of the World Series they went on to win. The seven largest World Series crowds of the last thirty-five years were all in that stadium, four in 1997 and three in 2003.⁴

The same pattern holds in the new park. It has filled several times since 2012, though almost never for a Marlins game.

League	Event	Date	Elbow Room
WBC	United States vs Dominican Republic	March 2017	0.004
MLB	Rockies at Marlins	March 2014	0.009
NHL	Winter Classic, Panthers vs Rangers	January 2026	0.040
WBC	United States vs Japan	March 2023	0.042
WBC	Puerto Rico vs Dominican Republic	March 2023	0.044
MLB	Marlins home average	2012–2017	0.790
MLB	Marlins home average	2018–2025	2.645

Miami's fans answer the visitor. Fenway's does not: Yankees or Athletics, Boston turns out the same. The same is true of the day and the month, and the three compound — the last three games of 2025 drew 34,546, 35,609 and 34,660 against the Mets, a weekend in September, after a Monday two weeks earlier that drew 7,992.⁵

In fourteen seasons the Marlins have come within 3% of filling that park six times. Five were Opening Day. The sixth was Summer Camp Day in July 2012, a 12:40 start against the Braves where the first 25,000 children through the gate got a free silicone watch.⁶

The question becomes: how can the shiny new stadium fail to deliver attendance results when it is measurably better in every way than its awkwardly configured predecessor? No one liked the old one, no one likes the $634 million replacement⁷, and the Marlins have few, if any, solutions.

Attendance is usually read as a verdict on the team, and 2018 shows what else it measures. The Marlins had been drawing around 22,000 for six losing seasons. Then in one winter the new ownership group, fronted by Derek Jeter, traded Dee Gordon, Giancarlo Stanton, Marcell Ozuna and Christian Yelich — four regulars, one of them the reigning Most Valuable Player — and the gate halved, from 20,395 a game to 10,014. The team was worse the next year, .391 against .475, but not twice as bad, and the park was the same size it had always been. What changed was what the fans thought they were buying a ticket to.⁸

Implementing the Right Way

In business, the ERP functions as the stadium would. It is the central meeting point between customer needs in the stands and company solutions on the field. The customer experience is defined by receiving the right products at the right prices with the right service and a company has a far harder time delivering on those expectations when they're fighting against an ERP.

Early in my career, I sat in on an Oracle Cloud requirements gathering meeting and witnessed the most devastating takedown of Finance by IT in recorded history. Over and over, members of the Finance team would say how they wanted their modules to behave, especially down to the individual steps that their existing SOPs had listed. Over and over, the IT reply, "That's not how Oracle works." rang out and the tension in the room lingered for weeks.

That experience taught me a lesson that I've carried into successful future implementations, including Oracle, DocuSign, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SAP S/4HANA: the system isn't going to change, our behaviors have to. By trying to control and customize too much, the IT load will increase and costs will rise beyond anything that was ever avoided by not retraining teams on the new way of doing business. The ERP itself will require constant maintenance, and software updates will be dreaded rather than celebrated. Eventually, the multi-million dollar investment will be seen as a failure and the hunt for a new ERP will begin all over again.

Returning to the baseball metaphor, sometimes the properly maintained historic stadium like Fenway Park is the right choice over the modern marvel like loanDepot park. At a previous company, our 1970s ERP with a DOS interface was better for our manufacturing business than Microsoft's Dynamics 365. But Miami never had Fenway Park, they only had Sun Life Stadium and loanDepot park, despite its flaws, is still a vastly better alternative.

Customer Experience into Company Experience

The Marlins did not lose their fans to the building, 22,000 of them came for six seasons to cheer on a team that never won more than 43 games at home. They only left when the players they cheered for were sold off after 2017, and a winning season five years later still could not bring them back. An ERP implementation works in a similar manner: it can be as powerful as can be. Whether it pays back depends on what changes around it, and that is the part I plan for first now.

But even so, fan experience, like customer experience, is only a KPI of the real goal for any business: making money.