When CPG Brands Need an ERP (And When They Don't)

There's a moment every growing CPG brand hits. Orders are coming in from Amazon, Whole Foods, and your Shopify store. Your 3PL is flagging inventory discrepancies. Your finance team is reconciling spreadsheets at midnight. And someone on the leadership team says: "We need an ERP."

Maybe. But maybe not.

The decision to implement an ERP is one of the highest-stakes calls a CPG brand can make. Get it right, and you build the operational backbone for your next phase of growth. Get it wrong, and you've signed up for a 12-to-24-month project that drains budget, demoralizes your team, and might not solve the problem you started with.

There is a legitimate case for an ERP. If your business needs a unified general ledger, consolidated financial reporting across multiple entities, and tight controls around AP and AR, a traditional ERP serves that well. It's the system of record for your financial truth.

Signals that an ERP is the right move:

You're managing multiple legal entities or international subsidiaries that need consolidated financials. Your auditors are asking for controls and audit trails you can't produce today. You need AP/AR workflows tied directly to your general ledger. You're preparing for a liquidity event and need your financials buttoned up.

In these cases, the GL and reporting capabilities of a NetSuite, SAP, or similar system are hard to replicate with lighter tools. This is what ERPs were built for.

Most CPG brands don't reach for an ERP because they need better financial consolidation. They reach for one because operations are falling apart. Inventory is a mess, orders are routed manually, purchase orders take forever, and nobody can answer "What's our margin on this SKU?"

The instinct is understandable: if everything is broken, buy the biggest system and centralize everything. But the results don't support that instinct. Research from Gartner and Panorama Consulting consistently finds that the majority of ERP implementations fail to meet their objectives, with average cost overruns reaching 189%. Many projects take far longer than planned, and a significant portion never deliver the expected benefits.

For CPG brands, the pain is worse. Your business changes fast: new retail partners, new 3PL relationships, seasonal SKU proliferation, shifting channel mix. Traditional ERPs are designed around rigid, templated workflows. They work when your business fits neatly into predefined processes. Most growing CPG businesses don't.

Here's what tends to happen: you spend six to twelve months implementing the system, customizing it to fit your current operations. By the time you go live, your business has evolved. You've added two retail partners, switched co-manufacturers, and launched a product line that doesn't map to the data model you spent months configuring. Now you're filing change requests and waiting weeks for adjustments that should take hours.

If you diagnose what's actually broken, the issue usually isn't the general ledger. QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite's core accounting module might be doing their job fine. The pain lives in the operational layer surrounding the GL: the interconnected web of inventory management, procurement, order routing, and fulfillment that keeps goods, dollars, and data flowing through your business.

This is where CPG brands feel the most pain. It's where you're trying to answer:

• What's our true landed cost on this product, including freight, duties, and co-packing fees?
• How much inventory do we have across our 3PL, co-manufacturer, and retail DC locations?
• Which orders should ship from which warehouse based on cost and proximity?
• When do we need to cut the next PO to avoid a stockout at Target?

These are operational questions, not accounting questions. Cramming them into a traditional ERP often creates more problems than it solves, because ERPs model operations through the lens of financial transactions, not how your supply chain actually works.

If your core pain is operational, not financial, you likely don't need a full ERP. You need an operational system that sits alongside your existing financial tools and brings order to the chaos without a rip-and-replace.

You probably don't need an ERP if:

• Your accounting system works and your CFO isn't complaining about the GL.
• Your primary challenge is inventory visibility across multiple locations and partners.
• You're buried in manual PO creation, order triage, and spreadsheet reconciliation.
• You can't afford to wait six to twelve months for value.

In these scenarios, the smarter move is to fix the operational layer directly. Lock down your master data. Unify your inventory view. Automate procurement and order management. Do it in a way that feeds clean, reconciled data back into whatever GL you're already using.

There's a middle path between "suffer with spreadsheets" and "bet the company on a monolithic ERP." It involves choosing systems built for the operational complexity of physical product businesses—systems that complement your financial tools rather than replacing them.

This approach delivers value faster because you're not boiling the ocean. Start with the most painful area—procurement or inventory—and layer on capabilities as your business grows. The key is choosing a platform composable enough to adapt as your operations evolve, rather than locking you into a configuration you'll outgrow in a year.

This is the approach behind DOSS Operations Cloud . DOSS helps CPG brands manage the flow of goods, dollars, and data across their business without replacing their accounting system. It provides modules for inventory management, procurement, and order management on an adaptive platform that molds to how your business operates—not how a template says it should.

Eight Sleep used DOSS to solve this exact problem. After tripling revenue, their NetSuite instance couldn't model the operational complexity or calculate accurate margins. DOSS mapped their entire master data model and delivered real-time, item-level contribution margin visibility in six weeks—while keeping NetSuite as the GL.

If your CPG brand is at the point where operations are outpacing your systems, the answer isn't always a bigger ERP. Sometimes it's a smarter operational layer that adapts to your strategy instead of constraining it.