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The guerilla ERP playbook for operators who hate bloat
A fast, scrappy approach to cloud ERP that keeps control in-house and goes live without million-dollar rollouts.
Enterprise resource planning is supposed to keep teams sane, but traditional ERP projects feel like stage plays: big stages, big budgets, zero agility. Here’s the field guide we use with scrappy operators to get cloud ERP live in weeks—not quarters—while keeping the power with the people who run the floor.
Why ERP projects stall
- Consultants own the roadmap, not your managers
- Data lives in POS, HRM, and spreadsheets that never reconcile
- Change management is theater: training decks, no playbooks
- Success metrics are soft ("user adoption") instead of hard (margin, shrink, labor)
The guerilla rollout strategy
- Start with one P&L question: pick a number you can move in 30 days—waste, overtime, or stockouts. Build only the workflows that touch that metric.
- Use shadow pilots: run the new ERP flow in parallel for one shift before announcing it. When it works, teams already trust it.
- Steal the data you already own: ingest exports from POS/HRM nightly before you wire APIs. Clean data beats perfect integrations.
- Lock the schema, ship fast: define 10–15 fields you’ll defend (SKU, unit, vendor, labor role, location). Everything else waits.
- Reward speed, not ceremony: celebrate the first successful night audit, not the kickoff meeting.
Minimum viable ERP stack
- Inventory: auto-reorder points per location with seasonal buffers.
- Labor + payroll: planned vs. actual hours with instant overtime flags.
- Procurement: approved vendors only; receipts matched to POs by exception.
- Reporting: one dashboard: margin, shrink, and labor. No vanity charts.
Signals that prove it’s working
- Shrink drops in week two because reorder points aren’t guesswork
- Overtime gets approvals before payroll closes, not after
- Menus and SKUs stop mutating because only one schema exists
- Managers stop asking for “the old report”
Make it real inside Workspaces
We built our ERP layer to run like a secret menu item: configurable enough for fast pilots, strict enough to scale. Grab the no-fluff walkthrough and see how we connect ERP with POS and HRM without another committee.
- 👉 10-minute demo: /platform/erp
- 📩 Want a quiet pilot? Reply “quiet launch” in chat and we’ll set up a sandbox without looping in a dozen stakeholders.
Go live quietly, prove the margin, then tell the story. That’s guerilla ERP.