Why Your ERP is Slacking During Peak Sales (and How to Fix It)
Fixing ERP lag with Race Mode in time for BFCM
When you’ve managed as many peak sales periods as we have, you learn a thing or two about keeping systems running smoothly when orders flood in.
I’ve lost count of the nights spent with eyes glued to dashboards, waiting for order data to start flowing—and sometimes crawling—through systems around BFCM, catching brief bits of sleep on beanbags in the office.
Both Maxime and Dom on the Commerce Thinking team are black belts in BFCM thanks in large part to their experiences in Gymshark.
Maxime, who was Head of Systems at Gymshark for five years, and Dom, who was a Swiss-Army Knife of a Systems Admin, were part of a team who pushed Netsuite ERP to its absolute limits. Few brands in the world have taken Netsuite further, especially during BFCM.
They’re joined by Andy who—as co-founder of both HighCohesion and Patchworks—brings a ton of experience to the table.
Between us, we’ve seen every corner of the ERP, middleware, and warehouse ecosystem strain through sales spikes. And we’ve learned what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t.
In this post, we’re not just talking theory. We’re sharing hard-earned insights into the real causes of ERP data lag during those critical sales periods and how we’ve developed Race Mode—a solution designed to help brands avoid bottlenecks and keep their systems running at full throttle.
Throughout this article we’ll use the example of Shopify, NetSuite, and Peoplevox - it’s the most common choice of tech stack we encounter. But the Race Mode strategy is entirely agnostic.
The Data Struggle is Real
Do you struggle to get data into your ERP during peak sales periods when your order volume spikes to 10-20 times your usual daily traffic? When your online store is suddenly flooded with orders, it can feel like your ERP is trying to keep up with a marathon at sprint speed.
As far as problems go, it’s a great one to have - your sales conversion rates are clearly soaring, so much so that your ERP can’t keep up. However, ERP data lag during the busiest shopping days of the year can have a profoundly negative effect on a business.
The problem isn’t your ERP. For the most part, all of the cogs and bolts work just fine (provided you have the right architecture in place around it). But if your ERP isn’t performing to the best of its ability during the 4-5 days of the year when you’re bringing in a significant percentage of your annual revenue - it’s a big problem.
In this post, we’re looking at the cause and effect of ERP data lag:
What is ERP data lag and why it matters
How it affects a business during flash sales
How to light a fire under your ERP’s a$$
Tackling ERP data lag with Race Mode
What is ERP data lag and why does it matter?
As your business grows, so does the complexity of your technology stack. At some point, most brands will implement an ERP system to streamline their operations. Depending on the architecture you choose, your ERP may become the central hub of your business processes, managing everything from order placement to fulfilment. Here’s a simplified look at how it all works:
The order is placed on Shopify (or whatever eCommerce platform you’re using).
It’s then sent directly (or through middleware) to Netsuite (or whatever ERP you’re using) and business logic is then added.
It’s then sent from your ERP to a WMS, (which could be in-house or outsourced to a 3PL).
The goal is pretty simple: Get your customer's order to your WMS system as quickly as possible. Any delay in getting the order to the warehouse might affect the actual delivery time/day.
All of these platforms have a limit in terms of how much data they can consume. So if you’re taking 100k sales orders during a peak sales period like Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and only 4k orders can be transferred into your ERP in an hour, it will take over 24 hours just to get the first few hours of a sale into your ERP and WMS.
Translation? By the time your systems have caught up, you’re already days behind.
The knock on effects of ERP data lag
Customer experience takes a hit
If it takes two days to get an order into your system to then send it to a warehouse, shipping times will be affected. Another common issue is that if a proper queueing mechanism isn’t in place, older orders won’t be sent out first. As a result, customers might not shop with you again, and your CLTV will dwindle.
Fulfilment can’t be optimised
With limited data, you can’t batch orders in the warehouse as effectively, leading to inefficiencies on the warehouse floor and potentially higher operational costs. This can slow down the entire fulfilment process, making it harder to get orders out the door quickly.
Reporting is inaccurate
Without all transactions in the system, reporting will be skewed. One example of this is if you’re running a marketing campaign, you might need to switch off spend in a certain geographic location when stock is sold out. But if you can’t run up-to-date reports, you are almost certainly wasting your marketing budget.
Stock efficiency is jeopardised
You might sync inventory from your ERP to your online store. If you can’t do that during peak sales times due to data lag, stock can’t be allocated to other stores, meaning that you can’t be reactive to stock requirements as they arise. It’s a huge missed sales opportunity.
Numbers can’t be crunched
In order for financial teams to close out the month, they need all data in their systems. Because Cyber weekend is always towards the end of the month, the finance department has to wait for upwards of a week to reconcile the most crucial sales period of the financial year.
So how can you light a fire under your ERP’s a$$?
When data lag negatively impacts a business, brands tend to look to their ERP provider to fix the issue. Chances are that their ERP rep has already discussed upgrading to a higher tier for more concurrency (at the end of the day, they have a job to do!)
Taking Netsuite as an example, you can upgrade and purchase additional SuiteCloud Plus licences for additional Integration concurrency. This will allow you to transfer more data to and from Netsuite concurrently. In essence, it's like increasing your bandwidth.
It seems like the obvious (albeit expensive) solution.
If your business has a greater need for additional licences outside of data lag, by all means, explore the option. But if it’s for the sole purpose of getting sales orders into your ERP faster, there’s a better way to do it.
Tackle ERP data lag with Race Mode
Upgrading to a higher infrastructure tier of your ERP won’t automatically fix the issue of data lag. Start by asking yourself two key questions: HOW am I getting my data into my ERP, and WHAT data am I getting into my ERP?
The HOW is determined by your middleware partner. Their capabilities are crucial in deciding if upgrading to a higher tier even makes sense for your business. Does your middleware partner offer autoscaling? Can they handle multiple threads concurrently? These factors will ultimately impact whether or not a tier upgrade will actually solve your data lag issues.
However, you need a middleware partner that can hit all of those concurrent threads at the same time and not every provider can offer that. So upgrading might be one part of the solution to ERP data lag, but it’s not THE only solution…
Which is why we’ve developed Race Mode - a solution to help ERPs manage high-volume data transfers during peak sales periods.
Now, ask yourself the WHAT data am I transferring, question again. Does it really make sense to process all of this information during peak times? Is every piece of data time-sensitive, or can certain processes be paused and handled once the rush is over?
By only transferring the most critical information first, Race Mode creates a streamlined version of each sales order. This lightens the load during peak periods, allowing non-essential data to be processed later when things have calmed down, significantly speeding up the overall data transfer process. Plus, Race Mode can be switched on or off as your business needs it.
Race Mode maintains your ERP’s status as the source of truth for a business during its 4-5 busiest selling days of the year (when it matters the most). For the rest of the year, your ERP can operate as normal. Ultimately, you won’t be backed into a corner to spend thousands of pounds on upgrading to a higher tier of your ERP if it isn’t necessary for your business. And even if upgrading is on the cards, you can be safe in the knowledge that you’re doing it for the right reasons.
Up to date data within 12 hours
One of our clients, increased their order throughput from 4k to 50k orders per hour by implementing Race Mode in their ERP and optimising the data their middleware solution sends to the ERP . This meant that all of their peak sales were up to date throughout the stack within 12 hours of the launch, and all critical reporting could be wrapped up in a matter of days rather than weeks.
If you are experiencing data lag, you’re obviously doing something right. But even if it is a good problem to have, it needs to be addressed in the right way, and spending money on upgrading your ERP generally isn’t it.
With the right team, Race Mode takes approximately 1 month to implement. So if you want to talk and get your business in a better shape drop us a line at hello@commercethinking.com