Fusion5 has completed the implementation of Oracle NetSuite’s cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for Australian country lifestyle clothing brand Ringers Western, enabling the retailer to modernize its finance and operations as it scales across retail, wholesale, and ecommerce.
Ringers Western operates 12 retail stores, supplies more than 220 wholesale stockists, and serves customers globally through e-commerce, generating over AU$50 million in annual turnover while targeting AU$70 million this financial year.
Replacing legacy systems with a unified platform
The company replaced a legacy system that struggled with multi-location and multi-currency reporting with NetSuite’s AI-powered platform to improve automation, reporting, and operational visibility.
Channel Insider spoke with Fusion5 Executive Director Sven Martin, who outlined the operational challenges Ringers Western faced before the implementation.
“Before NetSuite, Ringers Western was operating a high-volume, multi-channel business with disconnected inventory, ecommerce, and retail store data that could not keep pace with its growth,” Martin said.
“This became particularly evident during peak trading periods such as Black Friday, where system limitations were most pronounced.”
NetSuite ERP supports inventory and ecommerce visibility
Martin said NetSuite’s ERP platform provides Ringers Western with a single, integrated view of inventory, sales, and ecommerce data, replacing manual processes and reducing synchronization errors across systems.
He added that the implementation unifies the company’s sales channels and regions on a single platform, providing the real-time visibility needed to support continued growth.
Ringers Western CEO James Salerno said the implementation has allowed the company to shift its focus from managing disparate systems to scaling the business.
“Since implementing NetSuite, we’ve gained a single source of truth across finance and operations, while also automating inventory tracking and streamlining order management between locations,” Salerno said.
“This has freed our growing team to focus on expansion and improving customer experience, rather than tracking down errors across multiple platforms. We simply couldn’t have expanded so rapidly without NetSuite.”
Fusion5 shares ERP implementation lessons
As Ringers Western’s end-to-end implementation partner, Fusion5 led the project from the initial discovery phase through deployment, designing a NetSuite solution tailored to the retailer’s high-volume, multi-channel operations.
Looking back on the project, Martin shared several lessons for retailers evaluating an ERP modernization initiative, particularly around planning for peak demand and selecting the right deployment timeline.
“Design for peak, not average. The architecture was driven by edge-case volume and peak-event concurrency, not steady-state load. It’s about modeling your busiest hour, not your busiest day,” said Martin.
Deployment timelines and operational needs matter
Martin also emphasized the importance of choosing the right deployment timeline, recommending organizations complete ERP implementations well before major sales events, so teams have time to identify and resolve issues before demand spikes.
“Go live ahead of peak season. Ringers Western did so before Black Friday, ensuring the first major stress test wasn’t also the launch,” Martin said.
Martin also said retailers should rethink ERP as a platform that actively supports business operations, rather than simply recording them.
“Evolve ERP from a system of record that documents the business into a system of outcomes that runs the business, creating a single source of truth for transactions. A unified core with clean integrations to best-of-breed platforms (such as Shopify) is more effective than forcing all transactions through a single engine.”
AI product data becomes a priority for ANZ retailers
Asked which AI use cases are generating the most interest among businesses across the ANZ region, Martin pointed to AI’s growing role in helping retailers maximize the value of their product data while reducing manual work.
“The dominant theme among growing ANZ retailers is how to extract more value from product data with less manual effort. There is growing interest in using AI to interpret product images, titles, and descriptions to automatically populate these attributes, generate consistent product copy, and fill the gaps that typically consume significant team resources,” he explained.
Martin also said retailers are adapting to changing customer search behaviors, with AI assistants emerging as an increasingly important channel for product discovery.
“A related trend is the shift in how customers discover products. Increasingly, shoppers are starting with AI assistants such as ChatGPT rather than traditional search engines, which means products need to be clearly structured and understandable for these systems to recommend them accurately.”
“In practice, the same data improvements that reduce internal effort also improve external discoverability. For growing businesses, the appeal is that these changes do not require major system overhauls, just targeted, high-impact improvements.”
In June, we covered how Repco’s Zebra rollout reflected a broader shift in ANZ channel services. Read more about how Repco’s rollout demonstrates the growing opportunity for partners to move beyond hardware sales into delivery modernization.