We recently completed an ERP study for a brand. The conclusion, after proper cross-functional work: don’t proceed yet. Fix your product operations first, and migrate the systems that actually need migrating before touching the ERP question at all. We told them plainly that we wouldn’t sell them an ERP programme until that work had been done.
That might look like doing ourselves out of work. It’s the only honest way we know how to advise a client. When it’s not the right time for an ERP, it’s not the right time, whatever that means for us commercially - and it’s a far more useful outcome than most ERP projects produce, because most ERP projects start from “we need a new system” rather than “what problem are we actually trying to solve,” and the two questions lead to very different answers.
Sometimes twenty people need a process, not a platform
At a brand of around twenty people, the more honest fix wasn’t a new system at all. It was clearer process and better-defined roles. A platform can’t fix a business that hasn’t yet agreed who owns what. Buying one at that size usually just moves the disagreement into a more expensive piece of software.
This is the sequencing question in miniature: process and people first, system second, and only once the first two have actually settled down enough that a system would be configuring something real rather than something still being argued about.
We don’t sell a system. We sell the sequencing.
We’re vendor-neutral in the sense that we don’t push, sell or promote a specific product or agenda. What we’ve got instead is pattern-matching across enough different brands’ systems to know, with some precision, what tends to work, when, and why. That means we can be specific: this system, at this point, for this reason, and here’s what needs to change first and what shouldn’t be touched at all. It’s tailored to the individual business, not to a template.
We’ve written before about the tier question - which rung of the ladder actually fits a brand at a given size, and the specific graduation signals that tell you it’s time to move up one. This is the layer underneath that conversation, not a replacement for it. Tier selection assumes the timing question has already been answered. Most brands haven’t answered it - they’ve just skipped straight to comparing vendors.
It’s almost always people and process, not technology
Across enough brands now, the pattern repeats: the real gap is people and process, not the system. That’s where we focus our own time and resource, even when it’s less exciting to sell than a shiny new platform, because bringing in new technology without fixing the underlying process is how adoption falls apart. Teams don’t use what they don’t trust, and they don’t trust a system that’s just automating a broken handoff faster.
Part of doing this properly is being honest about where roles aren’t clearly defined, where a business might need someone new to actually own a function rather than share it informally, and where a team is already stretched thin enough that a new system will add workload rather than remove it, at least at first. None of that’s comfortable to say out loud in a sales conversation. It’s necessary to say it anyway.
Deploy with real data before you commit
Where a system decision is genuinely due, the useful move isn’t a slide deck of vendor comparisons. It’s someone standing up a working version with the brand’s own data and demonstrating it back to them, before anyone signs anything.
We try to show things practically wherever we can, not just describe them, and bring people along through the process rather than present them with a decision at the end of it. That single step removes most of the scope creep that comes from making a big decision on assumptions rather than evidence.
These are frequently six-figure decisions. Getting one wrong is considerably more expensive than getting it done slowly and correctly, which is why we’d rather a client have realistic expectations going in than a fast yes that unravels eighteen months later.
The sequencing question is the real decision
ERP versus PLM versus middleware versus “fix the process first” isn’t a menu you pick one item from. It’s a sequence, and getting the order wrong is the single most expensive mistake available. Systems bought to solve a problem that was actually about ownership, definitions, or process discipline don’t solve it. They just give the same disagreement a bigger, more expensive home.
The question worth asking before any ERP conversation starts isn’t which platform. It’s whether a platform is actually what’s missing, or whether that’s just the easiest thing to buy when the real answer is harder to agree on.
Start the conversation by contacting us.