How footwear brands can step up their game with tailored ERPs

Footwear brands will be all too familiar with the limitations of generic ERP systems.

Our own research last year found that the majority of footwear companies struggled because their ERPs weren’t built for their specific needs.

In fact, more than 70% of all fashion and retail decision makers said they relied on third-party add-ons to fill gaps in their current systems, highlighting the dire state many brands find themselves in.

If you also find yourself in this boat, don’t fret – there is a way forward. In this piece, we’ll explore how you can step up your game with tailored ERPs.

The state of ERPs in footwear

To kick off, we’ll look at some of the common challenges footwear brands face with their ERPs. One of the most surprising stats we unearthed was that only 30% of footwear companies rated their ERP highly for handling client order changes.

Just stop and think about that – seven out of ten brands struggle with something as simple and fundamental as order modifications. In a market where flexibility is key, that’s a significant handicap.

When it comes to item variants – a crucial aspect of footwear management – just 33% of companies rated their ERP as “excellent”. That means two-thirds of footwear brands are wrestling with systems that weren’t designed to handle the complexity of size ranges, width variations and colour combinations.

Perhaps even more concerningly, only 29% gave their ERP top marks for manufacturing capabilities, while a mere 28% rated them as “excellent” for season management.

Clearly, the footwear industry desperately needs better solutions and fast. The economic difficulties of the last few years aren’t likely to subside anytime soon, so it’s imperative that brands leverage tailored ERPs to tighten costs, improve margins and mitigate disruption.

The colour, size fit challenge

Footwear presents a distinct inventory challenge with its complex size ranges and colour variations. Each style might come in 6-12 sizes and multiple colours, creating dozens of SKUs for a single design.

Traditional ERPs typically struggle with this complexity, but ERPs tailored to fashion and footwear, like K3’s, are built specifically to handle these challenges.

Our solutions simplify product creation with intuitive matrix grids that make handling multiple sizes and colours feel effortless. Rather than dealing with complex spreadsheets or juggling multiple systems, you can manage your entire size-colour matrix from a single, user-friendly interface.

Crucially, this streamlined approach means your team can focus on creative and strategic decisions rather than getting bogged down in data entry.

Create BOMs for every item variant

It’s one thing creating and managing item variants, but it’s another thing to manufacture them correctly.

One thing that’s always surprised us is that most ERPs only let brands create a Bill of Materials (BOM) for an item but not its variants (i.e., sizes and colours).

Naturally, this creates headaches for those brands because different sizes and colours demand varying lengths of fabric and dye batches. The cost for each variant is also different as a result, but this isn’t accounted for in generic ERPs.

Our solutions completely remove this headache by enabling brands to create BOMs for every single variant, ensuring that the manufacturing process goes smoothly and costs are accurately represented in the system.

Just think of all the variants you create throughout the year. That’s a whole lot of resources and money you could be saving that would improve your bottom line.

Bring your teams together and empower them with AI

Success in footwear requires coordination across departments, but that isn’t possible without an ERP system.

With an ERP, the traditional silos of old that hindered collaboration amongst teams are broken down. Everyone works from the same system and data, meaning they work from the same playbook.

Our solutions are embedded in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 ERPs because we’re experts in fashion and footwear, not ERP. We chose Microsoft’s platforms because they’re the best – so you can be sure you’re using the best ERP tailored to footwear through us.

Microsoft’s also a leader in AI, and its flagship companion tool, Copilot, integrates perfectly into D365 (and, by extension, our solutions), so your data analysis is also levelled up.

Instead of spending hours digging through reports, your team can simply ask questions in plain English and get immediate, data-backed answers. Want to know which shoe sizes are trending in your downtown stores? Just ask. Curious about the optimal size curve for your new running shoe launch? Copilot can analyse your historical data and provide recommendations in seconds.

Tailored ERPs are an investment, not a cost

Throughout our research, it repeatedly emerged that budget constraints and change management were the top obstacles that prevented footwear companies from addressing their challenges.

Here’s the thing: persisting with a subpar system means you have to fill the gaps somehow. For 71% of all fashion and retail decision makers, that gap is filled with third-party tools.

So, inevitably, companies end up spending money anyway.

By embedding into D365, we drastically reduce the need for third-party add-ons to lower the total cost of tech stacks. The time saved in creating and managing item variants quickly adds up and becomes a ginormous advantage in the long term. And that’s without the resources and money saved from creating BOMs for every variant, too.

The point being, tailored ERPs like K3’s aren’t a cost, they’re an investment.

We have so much more to offer footwear brands than what’s outlined in this article. If you’d like to learn more about how we can support you, feel free to drop us a line today.