You know the feeling: a customer calls and asks, “do you have this in stock?” You say “let me check” — while secretly hoping nobody asks about the other two channels. A 25-person outdoor gear company lived that reality for two years. They sold on their own website, on a big marketplace, and through two retail partners, all from one warehouse, with three separate spreadsheets and a growing pile of backorders nobody could explain.
Here’s the mess they called normal: the marketplace showed 40 units of a camping stove, because the website team forgot to subtract the 25 units reserved for retail partners. A marketplace order came in, the warehouse picked it, and the website ran out of stock — causing 38 canceled orders in a single month. Customer service stopped answering the phone.
Spreadsheets are fine — until three people touch them
The real problem wasn’t the marketplace or the warehouse. It was that stock levels lived in four different places: the website platform, the marketplace dashboard, a retail partner’s portal, and a purchasing spreadsheet on someone’s laptop. The ERP Consulting conversation started with one simple rule: one master inventory number, visible to everyone, updated in real time.
What changed when stock became a single number
- Orders from any channel deduct from the same inventory pool, so a sale on the marketplace reduces website stock instantly — no manual subtraction, no forgotten reservation.
- Each product has an allocation rule: retail partners reserve a fixed quantity, and anything above that is sellable online. The rule is set once in the system, not scribbled on a whiteboard.
- Reorder alerts fire when available stock drops below the combined 30-day forecast across all channels.
Within two months, backorders fell from 142 open lines to 19. Canceled orders dropped by 87%. The warehouse manager put it simply: “I used to guess what to pick. Now I just read the screen.”
The ERP Consulting work didn’t end at launch. The team revisited the allocation rules twice in the first quarter as sales patterns shifted, and each tweak took an afternoon instead of a week. That’s the payoff of a system where everyone looks at the same number.