How Monos Manages 9-Figure Multi-Entity Ops & Accounting After Switching From SAP to Fulfil

The Search for an ERP Built for DTC Brands

Monos is a travel and lifestyle brand based in Canada. What started as a luggage company has grown into a brand that spans multiple product categories and touchpoints: DTC through Shopify, Amazon, wholesale through Nordstrom and Selfridges, and now seven owned retail stores across North America. The long-term vision, as Victor Tam, Co-Founder and CEO, describes it, is a brand in the travel and lifestyle space that eventually extends into hospitality as well.

Today Monos does nine-figure revenue across several regions of operation, including North America, the EU, the UK, and Australia. Behind that scale sits a supply chain team led by Brian Lim, Senior Director of Supply Chain, whose remit covers effectively any physical or digital touch on a finished-good product, from procurement all the way out to fulfillment and reverse logistics. As he puts it, the ERP is the backbone of everything his team does.

Getting there required solving a real infrastructure problem. As Monos expanded into new geographies (UK, Australia, the US) and added wholesale and retail on top of DTC, the complexity of managing inventory across multiple 3PLs, reporting in multiple currencies, and understanding true landed costs became impossible without an ERP built for it.

A 1.5 Year SAP Implementation That Went Nowhere

Monos signed up with SAP and spent a year and a half on implementation, but it never went anywhere.

"We had to hire implementers, effectively third-party people assigned to facilitate meetings and implement our needs," Victor says. "We found that process to be extremely slow, very expensive, and in most cases a lot of things got lost in translation over time. After close to a year of integration, it really didn't get anywhere."

The third-party model compounded the problem. Implementers were transient; new people would come in and the team would have to re-explain the entire context of their business from scratch. For a fast-growing brand where processes were constantly evolving, that churn was unsustainable.

"With SAP, it had been months of just trying to model how to integrate Shopify and make sure everything mapped correctly. We needed that piece to be seamless and fast."

The experience shaped a clear view of what the next ERP needed to be: flexible, fast to implement, and built for how modern digital-first brands actually operate, not how traditional retailers operated twenty years ago.

SAP vs. Fulfil: Why Monos Chose Fulfil

When Monos connected with Fulfil, the first thing that struck Victor was how different the CEO/Co-Founder dynamic felt.

"What struck me most was how easy it was to connect with the founding team. That's especially important in a partnership, having access to the people building the product."

Victor met ST, Fulfil's CEO & Co-Founder, at a summit with other brand founders. ST had spent years working as an SAP integrator, the same model Monos had just escaped, and had built Fulfil as a direct response to the limitations of that legacy approach.

"Him being an engineer himself, and showing up at that summit to connect with founders and builders, really showed me he was there to listen to what brands actually need."

At that dinner with other founders, the shared pain point was obvious: everyone had tried to centralize their data through NetSuite, SAP, or stitched-together software stacks, and none of it had worked. Fulfil was built to solve exactly that.

The one-click Shopify integration was critical. After months of failed Shopify mapping with SAP's third-party team, Monos needed that connection to be fast and reliable.

"The decision to go with Fulfil was simple. It was the nimbleness. Most people underestimate how important that is, not just for initial implementation, but ongoing. Feature requests, proactive updates, that gave us confidence that as the landscape evolved with technology, the software wouldn't go stale."

For Brian, the contrast showed up most clearly in how fast the team could actually go live.

"With the larger, traditional ERPs, a proper implementation runs anywhere from six months to two years, and it's a painful, prolonged process," Brian says. "Fulfil deploys a small, aggressive, agile team and pushes deliverables out quickly. Luis was one of the best consultants we've ever worked with. The speed at which we can roll out integrations is the speed at which we can enter markets and take advantage of new opportunities. We're talking weeks, not months."

Multi-Currency, Multi-Geo Operations: Unified

Monos operates in five countries: Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and Germany. They have a Canadian head office, a US entity, five retail stores in the States, two retail stores in Canada, and wholesale and DTC presence across all regions. Every transaction involves currency conversion. Every report needs to account for where inventory sits, what it cost to land there, and what it sold for in the local currency.

Before Fulfil, this was largely being managed through fragmented data and Excel spreadsheets. Brian's team felt it daily.

"Before Fulfil, we didn't actually have an ERP. We were operating off Excel spreadsheets plus what was effectively an OMS," Brian says. "We were trying to capture every physical movement in the organization in spreadsheets: receiving inventory, inventory on the water, customer shipments, returns, all of it. It was a lot of busy work. Fulfil coming in as our ERP was a game changer."

"Being able to unify all that data and convert currencies across all of it is incredibly helpful," Victor says. "Having Fulfil gave us confidence to reach into newer channels and geos, knowing we had an ERP partner that could integrate fairly seamlessly."

Fulfil's reporting gives operations, supply chain, finance, and e-commerce teams a single source of truth across every region and channel. Monos has also built their own internal AI models that integrate directly with Fulfil for custom data flows.

"A big part of what Fulfil enables is reporting, which ultimately is how you make sound decisions. Previously we could only go so far on gut instinct. At the end of the day, having good data that you can trust is the foundation for making smart decisions for the future."

Victor Tam, Co-Founder & CEO, Monos

When Their Previous OMS Broke During Peak

Before Fulfil, Monos was running a smaller OMS that couldn't handle their peak volume. The system didn't just underperform; it broke.

"We actually overloaded their system; it broke during peak and we had to manually sort through all the orders and manually assign them to different 3PL regions," Victor says. "Their servers just weren't built to handle that type of volume. That was a turning point; we knew we needed a proper ERP."

For Brian, the difference in robustness is night and day, especially for inventory.

"Fulfil has a real advantage over our previous OMS. It's far more robust," Brian says. "Inventory management used to be extremely difficult, because everything lived on our 3PL and WMS exports plus the master Excel sheets we used to combine that information. Now we have it natively within Fulfil, where it should live."

Monos now sees consistent seasonality: a spike around spring break, a dip through summer, a larger dip in early fall, and then the biggest volume surge around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Reliability during that November-December window is non-negotiable.

"Reliability during high-surge periods is critical. You need a partner with the right infrastructure to compute, and who understands that you're not their only client dealing with a massive peak period."

True Landed Costs, Every Month

A key metric for Monos is landed costs. With goods moving through different regions and warehouses, and selling at different times, monthly P&L accuracy depends on knowing the true cost of each unit at the time of sale.

"With goods moving through different regions and warehouses, and getting sold at different times, our monthly P&L was always fluctuating before we had an ERP," Victor says. "We needed true landed costs on a consistent monthly basis."

The general ledger and inventory management capabilities in Fulfil give the finance team what they need to close confidently each month. Container costs are tracked in real time, increasingly important given the volatility in global shipping and tariffs.

Seven Retail Stores, Tracked as Mini Warehouses

Monos opened their first permanent retail store in 2023 and now have seven retail stores. The stores are not transactional in the traditional sense: no commissions, no pressure to sell. The focus is on the experience; the architectural design is meant to transport customers from the sidewalk into something closer to a hotel lobby.

But operationally, they function as inventory locations. All seven retail stores are tracked through Fulfil, each acting as a mini warehouse. As the stores mature, Monos plans to use them as local fulfilment hubs to ship to nearby customers.

"We track inventory for our stores through Fulfil. All of our retail stores effectively act as mini warehouses. As we mature within those locations, we fully intend to use them to ship locally. It's been a very seamless integration and honestly I can't imagine being able to operate these stores without Fulfil."

Plain English AI: Agents, Reports, and Self-Serve Tools

Victor is most excited about the AI capabilities inside Fulfil.

"The AI piece has been a game changer. The ability inside Fulfil for our team to use plain English to build agents, build custom reports, and self-serve on the tools we need has been huge."

Monos also uses Fulfil's MCP connection to integrate with their own self-built AI models, piping data directly into custom workflows the team has developed internally. It's a level of integration that wouldn't have been possible with a legacy ERP.

"Fulfil is really at the forefront of implementing AI into the stack in a genuine way, not just a lazy chatbot, but actually allowing us to build our own tools and agents. It's great to see the team not just waiting but iterating, because these models are getting better and better and the pace of improvement is only accelerating."

On Brian's side, the same capability has changed who can get answers out of the system. Being able to connect AI directly into the ERP means people well beyond the supply chain team can self-serve.

"Being able to connect AI directly into the ERP and pull information at almost a plain-speech level is something that didn't used to exist," Brian says. "It gives people beyond my team access to the data they need. In supply chain, people are constantly asking when something is coming back in stock, why something is out of stock, when something was ordered. Now they can access that themselves. It frees up our junior members and gives everyone in the organization far more visibility."

The bigger wins come from wiring AI into the repetitive, high-volume work. SKU transitions are a good example.

"When we have orders missing SKUs, or we're mid SKU-version transition, we used to manually swap obsolete SKUs for new ones based on inventory position," Brian says. "At our scale that's hundreds, sometimes thousands of orders. You either have three or four people doing that around the clock, or you build AI workflows that handle it and just have someone oversee it. That can spare dozens of hours a week per employee."

Routine inventory work has moved the same way.

"Most of our inventory management now, the cycle counts and monthly reconciliations, is preliminarily done by AI, with people overseeing it to make sure the output makes sense and passes the sniff test. That saves us a lot of time and energy."

Doing More Without Adding Headcount

The compounding result of that automation shows up in headcount. Over the last year and a half, the operational surface area of Monos has grown considerably: new regions, new channels, and deeper investment in the channels they were already in. The team behind it has not.

"Over the past eighteen months there's been a surge of complexity in our supply chain. We've entered new regions and grown channels. Despite that, we've maintained the same headcount and the same workload per employee. We're effectively doing more with the same number of people. When we poll the team, a lot of them say they don't feel they need the extra headcount. That's largely because AI gives us the efficiency, and we have an ERP that can collaborate with the AI effectively."

Brian Lim, Sr. Director of Supply Chain, Monos

Confidence to Scale Into New Channels

When Victor reflects on the expansion, he's clear about what made it possible. The EDI layer handles wholesale integrations with partners like Nordstrom and Selfridges alongside the direct retail and DTC channels.

For Brian, a big part of that confidence is the ecosystem around Fulfil. When Monos goes looking for a new channel or 3PL partner, the groundwork is often already done.

"One of the best things about Fulfil is how aggressive they've been with partner expansion," Brian says. "Almost every partner we reach out to about a new opportunity already knows Fulfil or actively works with them. At least 80% of the major 3PLs we talk to have heard of them. The 20% that haven't tend to be older, less tech-savvy shops. Whenever we want to pursue an opportunity, it helps enormously that most of the partners already have experience with Fulfil." The Amazon integration, covering both 1P and FBA, is one he points to as working out of the box.

"Honestly, I don't think we would have expanded to where we are without Fulfil. Before, we were predominantly in North America and it was a lot of fragmented data and Excel spreadsheets. We were always behind in understanding our true landed costs."

Victor Tam, Co-Founder & CEO, Monos

Monos is continuing to build out retail, their stores are performing well, and the hospitality expansion is underway. They recently launched Postcard, a cafe and listening lounge in Chicago. As Monos moves deeper into offline experiences and new formats, the ability to manage the operational complexity from one system is what gives the team confidence to keep moving.

The Fulfil team's willingness to visit merchants on-site has also been part of the partnership. See related: Why we visit merchants on-site.

A Partnership, Not a Vendor Relationship

Victor draws a clear contrast between working with SAP and working with Fulfil, and it comes down to how decisions actually get made and how quickly things move.

"With legacy systems, you're rarely speaking to anyone who can actually make decisions. If you express a frustration or a need, it goes back to someone else and takes weeks before anything happens. With Fulfil it genuinely feels like a true partnership, with the technical team, the go-to-market team, the customer experience team. That responsiveness is what the modern company actually requires."

"I have ST on my phone and can tap him on the shoulder any time. I know a lot of people ST is personally connected to, and that's not unique to me."

"Knowing that a lot of the founders I'm close with are also Fulfil partners, and these are very sizable brands, gave me confidence. Things one brand requests often turn out to be exactly what another brand needed too."

Brian sees the same pattern from the operations seat, and it maps onto how Monos itself likes to run.

"The one thing I've been very happy with is Fulfil's rate of change," Brian says. "There's constantly kaizen within the organization. You're always making incremental changes to the ERP itself. When you work with other large-scale ERPs, you often don't see that same iterative change. It reflects the way our organization operates. We're constantly trying to improve every process, day by day, always looking for a better way. It's a matching spirit."

That fit was not obvious to Brian at the start. He came into conversations with Fulfil as a NetSuite advocate, and changed his mind.

"I came on board a huge fan of NetSuite, and I've done a complete 180," Brian says. "Fulfil is especially effective for D2C brands that are agile and tech-leveraged. As we explore partnerships, whether channels or 3PLs, the partners who are tech-forward and moving toward AI have all heard of Fulfil or are already integrated. If your organization values those same things, that's worth keeping in mind."

"Agility is more important than ever. Since Covid, consumer behavior has shifted, the geopolitical landscape has changed, and AI has disrupted everything. You simply cannot compare that to a traditional ERP where things move slowly and there's less tailoring to businesses like ours. I can't imagine still being with SAP right now. It would be quite painful."