quality assurance Questions

I do quality assurance lead work on medium scale ERP implementation projects, relatively complex and 1-2 years long.  Most of what I do is helping clients create their testing strategy, plan test events, gather results, train and manage testers, etc... I do very little actual testing.  I've taken some courses on quality assurance (for example, ISTQB), however I find most of the information is specific to greenfield software development; I struggle to find anything specific to ERP implementations, which are a different animal entirely.  There are some concept similarities, but I've had to build my own system for what I do.

I'm always keen to sharpen my skills, but the well is pretty dry here.  Am I alone in this?  Is anyone else looking for this type of information?  I can find a few blogs here and there, but nothing substantive.

Please list the Pros and Cons of manual testing.

Looking for recommendations for a testing tool that we can use to test our documents. Looking to test the document content, validate that the correct clauses are reflecting, the correct data is outputted, and that the layout is correct.

What are the kind of certifications or new skills that can be learned for a Software tester with 5 years of experience. Is there any tool-based certification?