When enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation projects blow past their budgets—and more than 30% of them do—the leading culprit is companies having to buy more software to make the original software work, according to Panorama Consulting's "2026 ERP Report".
Of course, none of that is the software's “fault.” It’s not a matter of poor-quality tools, but of teams choosing the wrong ERP for the job, or implementing the ERP incorrectly. Late in the project, organizations discover what Panorama calls "fatal misfits," and scramble to find bolt-ons and custom builds to patch them.
Ahead, learn how to implement an ERP without ending up in that 30%.
What is an ERP implementation?
An ERP implementation is the process of getting your enterprise resource planning system live, which covers everything between signing the software provider’s contract and your team running daily operations inside it.
The work in between includes data migration, module configuration, integrations, user training, and cutover; and teams would be wise to factor in time for change management once the cutover is complete.
For retailers, ERP implementation almost always touches each part of the tech stack that drives the business engine, including:
- Ecommerce platforms
- Retail point of sale (POS)
- Warehouse management systems (WMS)
- Inventory management systems (IMS)
- Third-party logistics platforms (3PLs)
- Customer accounts
- Finance systems
Each system holds a key piece of the company’s data, with some overlap; and part of ERP implementation is deciding which system is right when they disagree.
Note: ERP implementation is the work of setting up the ERP itself, including picking it, configuring it, moving your data in, and getting your team using it. ERP integration, on the other hand, is the work of connecting that ERP to your other systems, like Shopify and your customer relationship management platform (CRM) so that data moves between them automatically instead of through spreadsheets or manual processes.
Why is getting ERP implementation right important?
As ecommerce businesses add new channels and grow in complexity, ERP implementation projects cost more and get less forgiving when they go sideways. The median project length in Panorama's 2026 sample was nine months, and recent data shows the stakes are rising:
- Almost a quarter of ERP implementation projects surveyed ran over schedule, and of those, 58% blamed organizational issues. Governance gaps, resistance to standardization, and design decisions were frequently to blame.
- Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 70% of ERP implementations won't meet their original business case goals, and 25% will fail “catastrophically.” The same research found 75% of ERP strategies aren't strongly aligned with overall business strategy.
- Gartner also found that 27% of CEOs expect their businesses to operate largely without human intervention within three years. But AI workflows need clean data and consistent processes to function.
The pressure to move faster is also increasing. Panorama's report notes organizations are demanding "faster time-to-value in uncertain economic conditions."
ERP Today's Gertjan van der Linden says that if you implement a new ERP system and only start thinking about AI-powered processes later, "it's already too late."
For commerce specifically, you don't need your ERP to do everything if your commerce platform already handles the storefront, inventory, and POS side.
Apparel brand Good American, for example, scaled from $5 million to $100 million in revenue by moving to Shopify and integrating the commerce platform with their existing NetSuite ERP, and cut inventory discrepancies by 65% in the process.
“With Shopify, there is so much money and development effort saved by utilizing a system that can take care of retail and ecommerce. I think that’s the beauty of it,” says Edwin Portillo, VP of technology.
What are the core stages of ERP implementation?
Most ERP implementations can be broken down into five phases:
- Discovery and planning: Define what the business needs the ERP to do, set measurable goals, and assemble a cross-functional team. This is also where most projects quietly start failing. According to ISG's 2026 “State of SAP Migrations” report, only 18% of companies migrating to S/4HANA redesign their processes during the move; 49% keep existing processes mostly unchanged.
- Design: Map current processes against how they will run in the new ERP platform, then decide what to standardize, what to configure, and what to customize.
- Configuration and development: Build out modules, set up user roles, configure workflows, and develop the integrations that connect the ERP to your other systems.
- Data migration and testing: Clean legacy data, map it to the new schema, migrate it, deduplicate overlapping records, and test that everything works under realistic conditions. Panorama's 2026 report found that data issues drove 36.8% of timeline overruns.
- Go-live and post-implementation: Switch over, support users through the early weeks, then track whether the system is delivering the desired benefits. This last part gets skipped most often, which accounts for Gartner's 70% failure-to-meet-goals stat.
When sporting goods brand Everlast replatformed from Magento to Shopify, their ERP integration was the biggest piece of work. Their previous setup required heavy custom development to connect ERP, recommendation engine, and search, which caused inventory delays and order-processing bottlenecks.
The Shopify migration included a custom Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP integration for real-time inventory and order sync.
That kind of setup—where the storefront, ERP, and supporting systems read from the same data instead of running their own copies—is called unified commerce.
The unified commerce model is what stops the bolt-on cycle. When direct-to-consumer (DTC), business-to-business (B2B), and POS run on one source of truth, you don't need extra middleware to reconcile inventory between channels, extra tooling to sync customer records, or extra finance work to figure out which system was right.
In fact, EY's research on businesses running unified commerce through Shopify POS found 22% better total cost of ownership (TCO), 20% faster implementation, and an 8.9% sales uplift compared to the broader market.
How does Shopify fit into an ERP implementation strategy?
AG Jeans used to maintain dual integrations between their ERP and two separate systems: Salesforce Commerce Cloud for ecommerce, and Lightspeed for retail POS.
That means pricing, inventory, and SKU creation all required double-work. So when customers called support, reps had zero visibility into in-store purchases, and store associates couldn't see their customers’ ecommerce history.
After moving to Shopify, AG Jeans replaced more than a dozen system connections with a single ERP-integration pipeline.
"Everything related to ecommerce could integrate directly with Shopify and Shopify only," says Graham McCulloch, AG Jeans’ director of ecommerce and brand marketing.
"So long as we focused on the integrity of our integration between Shopify and our ERP, we had the freedom to adjust our ecommerce tech stack as needed, without having to take into account the limitations of the ERP."
In a unified commerce model, Shopify runs the commerce surface that includes your storefront, checkout, POS, B2B, and customer accounts. The ERP holds the financial and operational system of record, including inventory valuation, general ledger, multi-entity consolidation, and supplier management.
A key step in adopting a unified commerce model is connecting the ERP to Shopify. There are three basic types of ERP-Shopify integrations:
- Direct integrations: These are prebuilt connector apps that link Shopify to specific ERPs out of the box. Shopify's Global ERP Program offers certified apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Oracle NetSuite, Infor, Acumatica, and Brightpearl, each vetted through a 100-checkpoint security and performance review.
- Integration platform as a service (iPaaS): Cloud middleware like Celigo or MuleSoft sits between Shopify and the ERP, managing field mappings, retries, and error handling through one central hub.
- Custom API integrations: These build directly against Shopify's Admin API and webhooks. Webhooks broadcast commerce events as they happen, so downstream systems react within seconds instead of polling for changes every few minutes.
The connector you choose is half the decision; the other half is who installs it. For complex replatforms and ERP integrations, a Shopify Partner may be the best choice to set you up for success.
Shopify's Partner Directory sorts agencies into four tiers—Select, Plus, Premier, and Platinum—based on history and proven success on Shopify.
For ERP implementations, the relevant service categories are Systems Integration and Custom Apps and Integrations.
Take Portuguese footwear brand Sanjo. After migrating to Shopify with Shopify Plus partner Skrey, their ERP integration cut logistics time by 50%, and their B2B channel saw an initial 10% lift in growth.
Founder Sofia credited the network as much as the platform:
"For me, one of Shopify's greatest strengths is the TCO, but its network of partners and solutions—including the Shopify App Store—is unbeatable."
An actionable ERP implementation framework for commerce brands
Below is a six-step framework, grounded in expert guidance from Gartner and Panorama, plus the playbooks Shopify brands have used to get implementation right.
1. Audit current workflows and system pain points
First, scope what's broken. Sort the complaints into ERP problems, commerce platform problems, process problems, and data problems, because each one calls for a different fix.
Start with the data. Gartner's Andrew Hess said in an interview with TechTarget that data work should start before the implementation does: "Go look at your customer master and identify duplicates."
The same goes for product master records, supplier records, and historical transactions.
Then map the workflows, including order capture, fulfillment, returns, financial close, supplier reorders, and multi-location transfers.
Where does work currently break or need manual intervention? Who fixes it, how often, and at what cost?
2. Decide which system owns the problem
Gartner's Jackie Swanson says that most clients want 80% of the ERP out of the box because "it's embedded in best practices," with the remaining 20% configured to fit.
The reverse of that proportion can be a cause for concern..
If a team is pushing for heavy customization of the ERP to solve a workflow pain, it’s possible that the underlying issue is coming from somewhere else.
Take bedding brand Boll & Branch. They implemented NetSuite to handle financials, inventory, and back-office operations. That fixed the ERP-side problems.
But it exposed a separate set of issues the ERP couldn't solve on its own: Orders weren't routing to the closest factory automatically, retail partnerships needed dedicated inventory allocation, and fraud signals needed human review without slowing legitimate orders.
None of that was a NetSuite problem; it was an integration problem.
Boll & Branch worked with Diff Agency to build a Shopify-NetSuite integration that handled the orchestration the ERP wasn't designed for. Their annual revenue grew to over $100 million, a 430% increase from their pre-integration baseline.
The test: If the fix requires bending the ERP out of its standard shape, the problem probably lives in your commerce integration, your process, or your data—not your ERP.
3. Choose the target architecture: Replace, integrate, or unify-first
Once you know which problems live in the ERP and which don't, the next decision is structural. There are three common paths:
- Replace: Wholly replace the legacy ERP and migrate to a modern one like NetSuite, S/4HANA, Dynamics 365, or Acumatica. This is the right call when the existing ERP is fundamentally failing, and a deeper integration layer won't fix that.
- Integrate: Keep your ERP, but build a stronger integration layer between it and your commerce stack. This is what Boll & Branch did with NetSuite, Shopify, and Diff Agency; and what AG Jeans did when they consolidated over 12 system connections into one ERP pipeline.
- Unify-first: Move the commerce surface onto a unified platform before touching the ERP.
Ysé was running Odoo as their ERP plus Prestashop for commerce, and the pain was Prestashop crashing during product launches and forcing manual workarounds.
So founder Clara Gervais migrated the commerce surface to Shopify first, kept Odoo in place, and gained the flexibility to swap CRMs and migrate POS without affecting the rest of the architecture.
Their average cart size rose 30%, digital share of revenue grew to 65%, and the brand doubled their physical stores within two years. In this case, the ERP didn't need to be replaced; the commerce stack did.
A lot of enterprise brands end up combining these paths. Panorama's 2026 research shows 37.6% of organizations chose a hybrid implementation approach—going live with core modules or a pilot entity quickly, while sequencing additional locations, business units, or functions over time.
4. Map data objects and sync directions
For a Shopify-ERP setup, ownership usually splits like this:
- Inventory: WMS or 3PL; only the system that touches the boxes knows the true count.
- Customer: Shopify; the storefront captures the relationship; the ERP ingests it for credit terms, AR, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
- Product master: Product information management (PIM) or ERP; SKUs, base pricing, cost prices, supplier info; Shopify layers storefront data on top.
- Price (B2B): ERP; contract-specific pricing calculated in the ERP, and applied by Shopify at checkout.
- Orders: Shopify captures orders, and the ERP receives them for fulfillment and finance.
Next, decide how often each object needs to sync, and in which direction. For example, customer and product data should sync in near-real time, as those have a direct effect on real-time shopping experiences; while financial reconciliation and historical exports can run in batches overnight using Shopify's Bulk Operations API.
Write down exactly how each field maps between systems before you start building. For every Shopify order field, decide which ERP field it goes into and what happens in tricky cases, like a customer paying with both a gift card and a credit card.
5. Pilot with one business unit, channel, or use case
A pilot contains the damage if something goes wrong. If the data migration, integration, or user training breaks during a full enterprise-wide go-live—sometimes called a “big-bang” implementation—it breaks everywhere at once.
Pick the pilot scope based on what you want to learn:
- By business unit: Start with one subsidiary, brand, or region; this is useful when you're worried about multi-entity consolidation or compliance differences.
- By channel: Start with one sales channel, like DTC only, or wholesale only, or a single retail location; this is useful when you're worried about how the ERP handles cross-channel inventory and order flow.
- By use case: Start with one workflow, like order-to-cash or procure-to-pay; this is useful when you're worried about a specific process the audit flagged as broken.
Gartner's Andrew Hess told TechTarget that the biggest mistake he sees CIOs make is underestimating change management and data. Both need to be addressed early and given more attention than teams expect.
The pilot's job is to expose the hard cases before they hit production. Pick the part of the business that will stress-test the integration most; and, as Hess advises, "The default answer to new scope requests should be 'no'", even when the pilot reveals features people would love to add.”
6. Measure post-launch KPIs and optimize
The Panorama 2026 ERP report shows 87.3% of organizations realized productivity and efficiency benefits to the extent expected, but only 40.7% realized benefits tied to new operating models, and just 51.8% saw expected improvements in supplier interactions.
Gartner's Jackie Swanson told TechTarget that beyond on-time and on-budget delivery, the metric most worth measuring for adoption is: “Are people embracing the system? And does it benefit their daily work life?”
Then, keep measuring. The Panorama report flags that some benefits are lagging: silo reduction rose from 55.2% to 77.4% year-over-year in their sample because cross-functional alignment emerges only after master data governance and reporting standards have time to stabilize.
What are the common ERP implementation challenges?
McKinsey research shows that only 20% of companies capture more than half of the expected value from their ERP investments.
These are the ERP system implementation challenges, and what to do about each:
1. Customizing the software to match the old way of working
German supermarket brand Lidl spent nearly €500 million on an SAP project that was scrapped in 2018. The root cause was that Lidl tracked inventory by purchase price instead of retail price, like most companies. They refused to change the practice, so SAP had to be heavily customized, which set off a cascade of problems.
How to avoid it: When the ERP and your process disagree, change the process first. If a design has too many customizations, it's not a design that is likely to work elsewhere. For commerce, Shopify's Global ERP Program covers the standard NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Acumatica, Infor, and Brightpearl integrations out of the box.
2. Weak partner accountability
MillerCoors hired HCL Technologies to consolidate seven SAP instances. The first rollout had eight critical defects, 47 high-severity ones, and thousands of additional problems. MillerCoors sued HCL for $100 million. HCL countersued, claiming MillerCoors' management dysfunction was the real cause.
How to avoid it: Define decision rights, deliverable acceptance criteria, and escalation paths in writing before signing. The Shopify Partner Directory tiers agencies by Select, Plus, Premier, and Platinum based on track record; a vetted partner with documented Shopify-ERP implementation history takes some of that risk off the table.
3. Trying to change everything at once
Hershey's pushed for a 30-month rollout in 1999 despite vendor recommendations of 48 months, racing to beat Y2K. But testing got cut.
When the system went live during the lead-up to Halloween, the company couldn't process $100 million in candy orders, and annual revenue dropped 12%.
Compare that to Gesswein. The precision tool supplier ran a tightly coupled ERP and an inflexible commerce platform, which created product mismatches, inventory discrepancies, and manual corrections. Instead of replacing both systems at the same time, they migrated from BigCommerce to Shopify first, then integrated Shopify with Acumatica ERP through standardized APIs.
How to avoid it: Sequence the work so that you migrate commerce first, then ERP, then ancillary systems. Or migrate one business unit before the rest. Never run two major system changes in parallel unless one is fully stabilized.
4. Skipping data validation
When Target launched in Canada in 2013, they assumed a fresh SAP rollout would avoid data-migration problems. Instead, entry-level employees had to hand-key thousands of records under tight deadlines. An investigation found that only 30% of the data in the system was accurate.
How to avoid it: Audit and validate every source before implementation, whether you're converting from a legacy system or starting fresh. For commerce data specifically, Shopify's Admin API and webhooks sync products, orders, and customers from a validated source rather than relying on manual entry into the ERP.
Read more: How To Prevent ERP Implementation Failure in Commerce
5. Betting everything on a monolith
Vehicle management company LeasePlan wrote off €98 million on a failed SAP implementation in 2019. As CEO Tex Gunning told shareholders, "The monolithic nature of [the SAP system] hinders its ability to make incremental product and service improvements at a time of accelerated technological change."
LeasePlan pivoted to a modular best-of-breed architecture combining off-the-shelf solutions for individual functions like contract management, insurance claims, and predictive maintenance.
How to avoid it: Build the commerce surface on a modular platform that can evolve independently. This is the architecture Good American used to scale from $5 million to $100 million on Shopify and NetSuite without replatforming. Shopify handled commerce, NetSuite handled financials, and neither got rebuilt to serve the other.
“Having the data from NetSuite that our Logistics, Finance, and other teams need synced with Shopify is crucial for supporting our omnichannel operations,” says Edwin Portillo, VP of technology at Good American.
“With Shopify everything happens seamlessly.”
ERP implementation FAQ
What is ERP and how does it work?
An enterprise resource planning software platform connects your company’s core business functions, like finance, inventory, procurement, and human resources, inside one shared ERP solution.
Instead of teams working across disconnected tools, the system centralizes data and automates business processes so information updates in real time across the organization.
What are the 4 pillars of ERP?
The four core pillars of most ERP systems are finance, supply chain and operations, sales and customer management, and human resources.
Together, they support the main business processes companies rely on daily.
Is ERP a SAP system?
Not exactly. SAP is an ERP vendor, not the definition of ERP itself.
You can choose from many types of ERP software, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, and others, depending on your size, goals, and ERP implementation plan.
What are the three common types of ERP?
The three most common types of ERP are on-premise, cloud-based, and hybrid systems. The right setup depends on your infrastructure, security needs, and how your implementation team plans to support the new system long term.
What makes a successful ERP implementation?
A successful ERP implementation usually comes down to clear goals, realistic timelines, and strong alignment between the ERP project team, key stakeholders, and your ERP implementation partner.
Companies that invest in a detailed ERP implementation plan, change management, and employee training are more likely to see a successful implementation when implementing an ERP system.
