The setup

• Kristin was the Director of Operations and Inventory Planning at Skylar, a clean fragrance brand founded by former Honest Company VP Ops Cat Chen.

• As the company grew, they decided to implement an ERP. The goal was to help them track costs better, as well as model “bundled products” better between their Shopify storefront and their 3PL.

• Kristin joined the company after they had selected CIN7 as their ERP, but took over responsibility for implementation.

What happened

• What was supposed to be an 8-week implementation turned into months. There were a few key reasons:

  • Slow transfer of business context: External teams didn’t know enough about Skylar’s business to set the integrations up correctly.

  • Lack of full-time focus: The ERP implementation was only part of Kristin’s job, resulting in latency whenever the Skylar team became a bottleneck.

  • “Messenger syndrome”: Kristin was acting as the messenger between multiple different parties (the 3PL, the CIN7 team, and Skylar’s own tech team).

• Kristin was able to break this bottleneck by working directly with the CIN7 team.

• She also made sure to dedicate time to getting her entire team trained up on the ERP to ensure high usage.

Results

👉 Skylar completed their CIN7 implementation to their satisfaction, and got much higher visibility into their component costs.

👉 Several other customers of Skylar’s warehouse chose CIN7 as an ERP specifically because they had experience with it.

Key lessons

✅ Appoint a dedicated project manager

Latency is what kills complex projects. Have one person whose (ideally sole) job it is to keep the implementation moving along.

✅ Collapse information silos on Day 1

Make sure your tech team, your ERP implementation team, and your warehouse team can all communicate directly, without having to go through intermediaries.

✅  Invest in relationships

Your implementation manager is not your only ally at your ERP. For example, your salesperson also has skin in the game, since their commission depends on your success. Likewise, build goodwill ahead of time with your tech teams and 3PLs.

✅ Be a squeaky wheel, if needed

If your project isn’t moving along fast enough, don’t be afraid to escalate the issue to higher levels of management at your counterparties.

✅ Train your team

ERPs are fundamentally “garbage in, garbage out”. Make sure your team is comfortable using the software to ensure full compliance.