Replatform, ERP and product data, in the right order

We catalogued 25 systems and asked the business to rate its own confidence in each. Zedonk, running inventory and wholesale orders, came back as a priority to replace, along with the reporting layer.

The Range Plan, a spreadsheet, was logged as a system in its own right, because that is how the business used it.

The output was three architecture states and a roadmap where every item carried its blocking dependency. Process before data model, and data model before tool selection.

It also included a page of what to hold back on, such as BI before the transactional data existed to feed it.

We put it to the board that "do we stay on Magento 2" was the wrong question. The real one was which platform the business would build on for the next ten years, and that came down to wholesale architecture as much as the front end.

They chose Shopify Plus and went live on 1 May 2024, with a dedicated wholesale platform sequenced into the roadmap from the start.

Only fixed fields belong in a hierarchy, so drop weeks and months stay out, and colour and size are attributes rather than levels.

Two prototypes came out of the workshops and differed on a single level - whether Division anchors on product type or on fit. That choice decides how every report rolls up for years, so we ran the hierarchy as a facilitated process with named owners.

Resourced is the source of truth for product, with views built for merchandising, buying and product teams.

The ERP programme kicked off in March 2025, with phasing published in June in three waves.

On NetSuite we configured locations, uploaded the item master, added custom fields at item and transaction level and modelled the product hierarchy as Division : Category : Sub Category. LIDD built to our technical scope. The 3PL moved from Seko to Bleckmann, with first live fulfilment in October 2025.

One example of what the work looks like day to day. A purchase order stream to the 3PL was producing far fewer events than there were purchase orders.

The cause was a saved search returning a single page of results, and the fix was pagination and batching rather than a redesign. Knowing how the platform behaves turned that into an afternoon's work.

We hold the architecture. Specialists build to it.

Getting systems in is one half. Getting a growing team to work inside them is the other, and it decides whether any of it pays back.

So we resource it like a workstream: SOP workshops department by department, cross-functional training, data completeness scoring and named owners per function.