This article analyses how a generic form of information technology (IT), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, can be selected by companies to enhance their business. ERP systems are a means of becoming more efficient through predefined standard functions called 'best practices'. Following the theory that markets are made up of business relationships in a network context, managerial advice would be to assess the vendor's existing business relationships. A company can harvest the inherent functions that an ERP system has from the vendor's prior interaction with other customers. This paper discusses how a company benefits from engaging in a new business relationship with an ERP vendor to become more competitive. However, this relationship is double-edged. A lesson is that the functions developed by the ERP vendor and the customer only offer a temporal competitive advantage, given that it can be used later in the ERP vendor's other connected business relationships.