Last week I argued that ERP systems aren’t what’s failing, the way they get delivered is. Naturally, the follow-up is what a better delivery model actually looks like and how it differs to the current norm.
Atelier is our delivery model and is being built for fashion and lifestyle brands. It’s built out of more than 60 years of collective experience in that sector.
Look at who’s in the room on the partner side
Map the people who implement ERP for a living. Most come from finance or from systems and technology, and most have a consulting background behind that. It’s a decent set of skills for configuring a system, and I’d want all of it on a project.
Very few of them, however, have sat inside a brand and owned a process that the ERP was about to change. The overlap between “can configure NetSuite” and “has run buying, planning or ops in a brand doing £20m to £200m” is actually pretty small, and it sits in a handful of places.
Which is why UAT normally goes the way it does. When your merchandiser says this isn’t how buying works here, there is often nobody on the other side of the table who has ever been a merchandiser. And lacks the in the bones knowledge to interpret what’s being feedback.
Most ERP experts interpret your problems through the prism of the system, not your actual needs
The mechanism has nothing to do with how good anyone is at their job. If your client list runs from food manufacturing to industrial distribution to fashion, the only thing you carry between projects is the system. So the system becomes the prism. Discovery gets run through it, and every process a brand describes gets assessed as something NetSuite, Dynamics Business Central, SAP, Fulfil, Sage does well, does badly or doesn’t do.
I’ve watched that on plenty of projects and it’s usually where things start going wrong. For instance, a brand raises a pain point, the answer comes back as a piece of NetSuite functionality, and nobody stops to ask whether it belongs in NetSuite at all. Sometimes it should sit in Shopify. Sometimes it belongs in the WMS or the integration layer. Sometimes its best done in a spreadsheet. Or a homegrown Claude app. And sometimes it’s just a process change that costs nothing.
Fashion and lifestyle brands do a particular set of things. Product gets conceived, ranged and bought against a critical path. Stock gets split across DTC, wholesale and retail, and wholesale runs on its own clock with its own terms and its own allocation. Size curves and holdback are decisions the merchandising team needs to control rather than raise a ticket for. A delivery model built for that starts from the operating model and treats the system as one of several places where the answer sits.
There’s a finite number of ways to get a product concept to a purchase order
Everyone thinks they’re the exception, and roughly one time in twenty they are.
A PO approval flow that matches how a fashion brand actually signs off intake looks much the same across most of the brands we work with. So does the shape of range critical path tracking, and the way a made-to-order line has to behave differently from the rest of the catalogue. None of that needs designing from scratch on your project. It needs deploying, then testing against the handful of things you really do differently.
Specialism also buys certainty. You can configure NetSuite thousands of ways, and most of the value is in knowing which one makes sense for a brand of your size and shape. Then being willing to say so on the call, rather than presenting you with options and calling it collaboration.
Where the 60 years came from
Between the team at Commerce Thinking, there is more than six decades of experience in this sector, and most of it was earned brand side rather than in consulting. On merchandising and planning desks, and in ops and systems roles, inside brands going through the growth stages the ones reading this are in now. That is what got built into Atelier, and it’s why there is a standard configuration to deploy at all.
We then have two co-founders (me and Andy), who also co-founded two leading integration platforms (HighCohesion and Patchworks) and have worked on hundreds of back-office transformation projects. When you’ve got that depth and breadth of experience you see the trends better than anyone else.
It also means we say no to things. Brands on platforms we’ve decided not to work with go elsewhere, and every so often a good one goes to a partner who said yes to something we wouldn’t.
I put a version of a NetSuite partnership to someone senior there last year, and what came back was that the market doesn’t need more generalist partners. It needs people doing something distinct in one vertical who can prove they do it differently.
The part specialism doesn’t fix
Where I’ve seen implementations go badly wrong, it has usually been governance rather than the partner. That looks like too many projects competing for the same handful of people, or the team that owns the outcome turning over halfway through. Being right about the industry doesn’t rescue a programme the business hasn’t committed to, and any partner telling you it does is selling.
What specialism does buy you is a shorter, cheaper argument about the things that are actually yours, and a team who can tell the difference between a real quirk and a habit.
If you’re weighing up an ERP decision, reply to this and come and see it working.