An ERP choice the board could defend

Two systems that didn’t talk to each other, a business running on spreadsheets and a choice the board would have to stand behind.

The problem

A design-led manufacturer with UK and US operations had outgrown its systems. The UK ran on a heavily customised legacy ERP supported by a single small reseller. The US ran its finance on a separate package. Neither talked to the other, nor to the website, the CRM or the courier platforms.

So the business ran on spreadsheets. Stock and sales used different codes and were reconciled by hand each week. Margin reporting left out shipping, duty and labour, so nobody could say with confidence which ranges made money. Intercompany trade was processed line by line, then revalued at month end to make the two sets of books agree.

Private equity investment had raised the bar on growth, reporting and control. The client’s IT lead, working with the executive team, asked us to answer a question that was easy to ask and hard to answer: one integrated ERP or best of breed? And which product and partner?

Our approach

We started with an eight-day gap analysis, built on interviews across the business and a walk-through of how customers buy. It showed the problem wasn’t only the software. Manual workarounds, weak controls and a reseller that charged for every change had grown up around it.

Requirements came from onsite deep dives across sales, purchasing, production, warehouse, dispatch and finance in both regions. We prioritised them with MoSCoW and mapped each one to five business objectives, so every later score traced back to something the business said it needed. Before going to market we tested the strategy itself, including a low-code build. We also settled the scope so every bidder priced the same thing.

An RfI drew 12 responses and cut the field to seven for the RfP. Every bidder then scored 95 to 97% on functional fit, so features weren’t going to decide it. We moved the weight onto delivery: programme leadership, integration sequencing, data readiness and governance. Fourteen independent scorecards and scripted demos built on the client’s own processes narrowed it to one. When a new CFO joined mid-process, a short onboarding pack and agreed scoring guardrails stopped earlier decisions being reopened.

The outcome

A single ERP strategy for both regions, with a manufacturing-specialist product and partner chosen on evidence the team can explain line by line. The client’s own people did most of the scoring, so the decision is theirs, not ours. We validated the partner with the software vendor before recommending them, so the board knew there was backing if anything went wrong.

The client is now running the implementation in-house with the chosen partner, working from the requirements, scripts and evidence the selection produced.

We delivered this work alongside a delivery partner.