Customer case / Fashion
Mapping daily work before an ERP investment
An international fashion company was considering replacing its legacy ERP system. Before asking for investment approval, the customer needed a documented view of how work was actually done. Elvenite worked with the customer’s teams to map current processes and document recurring problems.
Case facts
Project:
Process mapping pre-study before a potential ERP investment.
Process scope:
Demand planning, procurement, inventory, order management and finance.
Delivered:
AS-IS process maps, findings, recommendations and financial estimates.
Financial assessment:
Estimated current cost impact and potential ERP savings; benefits still to be evaluated.
Elvenite helped us bring the process knowledge from different teams together. Before assessing a new ERP system, we needed a shared picture of how our daily work actually ran
Understanding how the business worked
Before seeking approval for a potential ERP investment, the customer lacked a shared, documented view of how its processes worked. It needed to clarify the activities involved, where manual steps occurred and who owned the work across teams and systems.
The initial challenge was to bring that knowledge together. A common understanding of current operations would help business owners and decision-makers identify improvement priorities and assess what a future ERP system would need to support.
Mapping daily work with business owners
Elvenite held workshops with the people responsible for demand planning, procurement, inventory, order management and finance. Together, they mapped activities, responsibilities, decisions, handovers, systems and pain points.
The work documented how processes actually ran, including the data, exceptions and manual steps that supported daily operations. The maps showed where work passed between teams and systems.
What the process mapping revealed
The pre-study produced process maps and findings that documented how the business worked.
The mapping revealed that daily operations depended on employee expertise, manual checks and workarounds across business systems, spreadsheets and email. Teams kept work moving through repeated data entry, file handling and coordination between departments.
Information was fragmented, with limited visibility of stock, orders, deliveries and financial status. Inconsistent data definitions and ownership added to the difficulty of following work across functions. Integrations required manual monitoring and error correction.
Recommendations covered reducing duplicate work, strengthening integration monitoring, clarifying data ownership and standardising access, approvals and audit trails.
Preparing the ERP business case
The pre-study identified recurring problems, recommended how to address them and developed quantitative estimates of their current cost impact and the potential savings from an ERP implementation.
The customer can use the maps, recommendations and cost estimates to prioritise improvements and build its ERP business case.
The findings from Elvenite gave us a common ground based on data to prioritise next steps and quantifying ERP-related challenge areas and opportunity costs.
The next decision
Before making an investment decision, the customer can now test the savings assumptions and assess how potential ERP systems would meet its requirements.
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