ERP for Government & NGO: Major Products & Players

Government and NGOs require ERP software which is effective and reliable. In the past, there have been many horror stories of public sector ERP disasters. Perhaps the most publicised of these has been the U.S. Air Force and its $1 billion spend on the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS), which was scrapped due to spiralling costs.

This ERP vendor directory to the major products and vendors for government and NGO organisations will help you avoid a repeat of that $1 billion write-off; included are the likes of CGI, Microsoft, Unit4, Deltek and Workday.

CGI

CGI provides a number of ERP solutions for public sector organisations. Having acquired the British IT services company Logica in August 2012, CGI became the fifth-largest independent business process and IT services company in the world at the time.

The Montreal-based ERP vendor integrates systems including Oracle, SAP and Maximo. The company also offers its own public sector ERP solutions:

• CGI Advantage ERP for state and local government agencies, and
• Momentum ERP for federal government agencies. 

CGI Momentum is now used by more than 180 federal organisations, supported by roughly 7,000 federal-focused CGI staff, and remains the only core financial management platform currently in production across federal agencies to hold Treasury's FM QSMO approval. By 2025, CGI itself had grown to around 94,000 employees across 400+ offices in 40+ countries. CGI's clients include the Canadian government and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Microsoft

Another well-known provider of ERP for government and NGOs is Microsoft. When this article was originally published, Microsoft Dynamics AX was built specifically for the government and NGOs, designed to reduce overheads, increase cost savings, control, and transparency. Examples of this include the potential to manage multi-year grant funding and projects through configurable budgetary controls.

Dynamics AX itself has since been rebranded and re-platformed: Microsoft moved it to the web and renamed it Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations in 2018, then split it in 2020 into the two products government and NGO customers use today, Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Unit4

Clearly CGI and Microsoft provide large-scale solutions to government and NGO organisations, but other ERP vendors also serve this market. These include Unit4, which has provided ERP solutions for individual county health services in the UK and for the NGO Ipas.

Unit4 itself has changed hands and rebuilt its product line since then: Advent International acquired the company in 2014, and TA Associates and Partners Group took a growth stake in 2021 at a valuation of more than $2 billion. The old Agresso brand is now folded into Unit4's People Experience Suite, alongside a next-generation cloud ERP, ERPx, launched in 2021 and built on Microsoft Azure; on-premise support was withdrawn in December 2024. 

Jobscope

Jobscope's offering is a more targeted product for the government contractor manufacturing industry. The ETO ERP helps government contractors meet AS9100, ISO9000, and DCAA compliance requirements.

Jobscope is popular among order-driven and project-based manufacturers, including aerospace and defence contractors, though it now competes with much larger specialists. Deltek's Costpoint, for instance, is used by 96% of the top 100 U.S. federal contractors and more than 9,600 government-contracting customers overall, with FedRAMP, CMMC, NIST and ITAR compliance built in.

Workday

Since this article’s publication, the government and NGO ERP market has also gained another major cloud-native entrant: Workday; Workday Government Cloud now counts the U.S. Department of Energy, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the states of Oklahoma and Vermont, and the City of Arlington, Texas among its customers.