Is Your ERP Failing Because It Lacks Context?
Fashion brands, read this...
You can have the best ERP in the world. You can hire a top-tier consultancy. You can follow every best-practice implementation guide ever written. But if the people designing your systems don’t understand how your business actually works, not how it should work, not how it works in other industries, but how it really works on the ground, then your ERP will quietly fail you.
Not in dramatic ways. It won’t crash or throw error messages. It’ll just slowly become the reason teams keep a separate spreadsheet. The reason workflows get routed around instead of through. The reason nobody seems to trust the data.
And most of the time, the root cause is the same: configuration decisions made in a vacuum.
ERP decisions are business decisions
The problem isn’t that the ERP was configured badly. It’s that it was configured generically. Designed around what the software can do, not what the business actually needs it to do.
Fashion brands aren’t plug-and-play. They run on a mix of commercial instinct, deep category expertise, and chaotic seasonality. Buy plans shift. Range plans change. Sizes get dropped. POs get pushed back. Peak order volume arrives in a concentrated 48-hour spike.
A good ERP setup doesn’t just survive this. It anticipates it.
To do that, you need system architects who understand the workflows of fashion. Who know why merchandising delays PO lock dates. Who get how product development cycles bump up against buying deadlines. Who understand that a late landed cost update isn’t just a finance issue, it throws off margin tracking, SKU-level reporting, even marketing spend decisions.
You don’t need deeper config. You need broader context.
We’ve seen so many projects where the ERP setup technically ‘worked’ but the business didn’t trust it. Why? Because it didn’t reflect reality.
There was no understanding of the finance team’s reconciliation process, so reporting deadlines got missed. No understanding of how customer service handles exchanges, so return flows weren’t mapped properly. No understanding of launch planning, so new product workflows needed to be rebuilt from scratch.
A well-trained systems admin doesn’t need to be a financial controller. But they do need to know what finance cares about. They don’t need to be a merchandiser, but they should know how drops get planned and how late changes affect operations.
And that kind of contextual awareness isn’t taught in ERP training. It’s earned through hands-on experience, or built through deliberate onboarding and mentoring.
Configuration is overrated. Interpretation is underrated.
Most ERP systems are incredibly flexible. That’s not the issue. The issue is choosing what not to build. What to say no to. Where to stick with native flows, and where to customise. That only happens when you have someone who understands both the system and the business deeply enough to bridge them.
This is why we’re helping brands train their own systems teams. Not just on how to use an ERP, but how to understand the business around it:
How finance measures margin
How buying cycles really play out
How fulfilment operates under pressure
How stock sits across regions and channels
How the customer experience is affected by backend decisions
It’s this training that turns someone from a button-pusher into a trusted internal operator. From a reactive support function to a forward-looking problem-solver.
Context is scalable. Configuration isn’t.
What you really want is a systems team who can grow with you. Not just keep things running, but actively improve the way your brand operates. That means hiring differently. It means looking at roles like customer service, operations, even ecom execs, and asking: who understands how this business really works? Who’s already thinking cross-functionally?
It’s often easier to train those people on systems than to teach a technically-minded person how to think commercially. It’s also more sustainable. You’re not just plugging a gap. You’re building a capability.
Final thought: ERP doesn’t solve problems. People do.
If your ERP project isn’t grounded in your specific business context, your processes, your quirks, your pressure points, then it will always feel slightly off.
That’s not a software issue. That’s a thinking issue.
And the fix starts with who you invite to the table, and what they know about your world.