Your ERP anchors the ship. It serves as the backbone of your retail operations. Outdated cores bloated with custom code and patched acquisitions steadily devour budgets while agility evaporates.
E-commerce now claims 16% of total sales. Customer demand shifts at lightning speed as a viral TikTok turns niche items into bestsellers overnight. Shoppers expect seamless experiences across stores, apps and marketplaces, driving unprecedented volatility that overwhelms batch-driven ERPs and turns every new channel or promotion into expensive customization.
Teams embarking on upgrades or core consolidations hold a unique opportunity to redesign for sustainability by shifting to agile architectures tailored for modern commerce, where an Order Management System (OMS) acts as the critical de-risker by offloading order complexity from the ERP and delivering long-term cost reductions.
Four Ways to Reset the ERP Cost Curve
1. Minimize Custom Baggage in the Core.
Upgrades often carry-forward extensive lists of custom objects that signal deep ‘technical debt’ and inflate future maintenance bills, with Statista revealing that 1 in 3 ERP projects overrun budgets, especially those with heavy customization. In retail, much of this code governs order logic such as channel flows, pricing rules and delivery promises.
Ask two questions before porting:
- Which truly differentiate your competitive edge or protect margins?
- Which replicate rules better handled by an OMS?
Shoppers abandon retailers missing delivery dates by more than two days at a 69% rate, so promise and routing logic demands rapid evolution; embedding it deeply in the ERP triggers exhaustive test cycles for every adjustment. Sustainable design maintains a lean ERP focused on inventory and finance fundamentals while shifting volatile rules to a configurable orchestration layer, granting businesses essential flexibility without the pitfalls of upgrade traps.
2. Replace Spaghetti Integrations with OMS Hubs
ERPs frequently anchor sprawling webs of direct connections from web stores, in-store systems, marketplaces, warehouses, 3PLs and carriers, each requiring bespoke mappings that explode into massive reworks and retests during core upgrades, positioning ‘integration’ as a leading cause of most ERP cost overruns.
Signal quality suffers as well, with store inventory accuracy lingering at 55-65% according to McKinsey, a situation exacerbated by point-to-point connections that propagate inconsistencies across channels and spawn cascades of fixes like stock adjustments, emergency patches and retests that relentlessly drive up expenses.
You can redirect flows through an OMS hub employing standard APIs and canonical formats enables the ERP to connect once while channels plug in seamlessly, yielding fewer incidents, reusable patterns for new channels and centralized order logic that de-risks rollouts and dramatically shrinks testing scopes.
3. Build Returns, Exceptions and Peak Traffic-in from Day One.
US shoppers returned $850 billion in merchandise in 2025 per the NRF report, equaling 16% of retail sales with apparel at 26% and e-commerce averaging 25%, as these events inflate freight, handling and markdown costs.
Incorporating such flows into the upgrade design rather than leaving them to “business as usual” has two cost benefits:
- Less firefighting after go-live.
- Less pressure to patch the new ERP for scenarios ideally managed in an orchestration layer.
With 80% of shoppers citing post-purchase experiences as key to repeat business, smooth returns safeguard both costs and revenue. An OMS layer that views the entire inventory network selects optimal fulfillment paths, updates the ERP and warehouses accordingly, ensuring the backbone records unvarnished truth while orchestration charts the optimal route forward.
4. Neutralize Talent Risks and Shadow Systems
ERP specialist shortages, cited in multiple surveys, lead to delayed changes and higher day rates, while shadow spreadsheets handling allocations, exceptions and repricing evade project budgets yet demand endless reconciliations and fail spectacularly during peaks.
An upgrade presents a rare window to formalize these into OMS-driven workflows and rules engines, transforming scarce-expert dependencies into cloud-native tools accessible to broader teams that hire and scale more readily, converting hidden risks into governed, testable assets.
Reset the curve now
In conclusion, retail leaders can seize this upgrade moment through three decisive moves:
- Strip order-specific logic to OMS,
- Streamline channel communications via clean hubs and
- Formalize volatile rules into adaptable components rather than bloating the ERP core.
Executed properly, this redesign renders operations leaner, more changeable and precisely aligned with modern retail dynamics, bending costs downward while accelerating performance.
Audit your setup today and harness OMS leverage to reclaim margins your competitors are missing out on.
