How Enso Rings Ripped Out NetSuite and Saved $80–90K a Year Running In-House Manufacturing, Fulfillment & Acquisitions on Fulfil

Overview

Enso Rings makes silicone rings, but the operation behind them is anything but simple. Based in Utah, the company controls an unusually deep slice of its own supply chain: it takes raw material, mixes it to the right color, forms and manufactures the rings, engraves them in-house against a roster of licensed partners like Disney, Marvel, Pokémon, and the NFL, and ships every order out of its own facility.

That vertical integration happened deliberately. "When I first started in 2018, we did about twenty percent of our rings in the US and about eighty percent were sourced," says Mike Gallman, COO. "That has completely flipped. We're doing about eighty percent here in the US now." Along the way, Enso brought fulfillment in-house from a 3PL and moved engraving in-house too. "From a supply chain standpoint, we control a lot of that supply chain right here."

Running DTC, Amazon across the US and Canadian markets, and a growing wholesale channel, on top of manufacturing, engraving, and licensing royalties, demands an ERP that can hold all of it together. For three and a half years, Enso tried to do that on NetSuite. It didn't work out. This is the story of why they ripped it out, moved to Fulfil, and turned their own operations into a platform for acquisitions.

The results:

• $80–90K a year saved in fulfillment labor costs after leaving NetSuite
• 30%+ faster pick times after moving to paperless pick, scan, verify
• Same-day productivity for new warehouse staff, including people borrowed from other departments during peak season
• 7,000+ new SKUs and new Shopify and Amazon storefronts added after acquiring Lokai, at no extra cost for the new connections

For any brand weighing a NetSuite alternative, Enso's experience is a useful benchmark: a manufacturing ERP with a built-in WMS, native Shopify and Amazon integration, and one system instead of a stack of software stitched together with middleware.

The Challenge: The Hidden Cost of NetSuite

"There's hidden costs, and those hidden costs really start to add up."

— Mike Gallman, COO

About six years ago, Enso decided it was time to move off Stitch Labs, the order management system it had outgrown, and adopt a real ERP. "We needed something more robust," Gallman says. "We needed something that could handle all of our bill of materials complexity. We also manufacture in-house, so we needed something that could handle all of that manufacturing piece."

The search narrowed to two finalists: NetSuite and Fulfil. "Throughout the whole process, we really were like, we're going to go with Fulfil," Gallman recalls. "And at the last minute, NetSuite won us over and we chose NetSuite. Maybe a little bit of it was the NetSuite name. Our viewpoint of Fulfil was, will they be around? Is this a short-term solution? We were looking for a long-term solution."

The NetSuite implementation was scoped for six months. It took nine. "Our first ERP implementation with NetSuite, I was here from 7 a.m. till 1 in the morning sometimes, and on weekends," says Austin May, Supply Chain Manager and ERP Admin.

Middleware and delayed transactions

Enso runs on Shopify and, at the time, shipped through ShipStation. NetSuite didn't connect those systems directly, so Enso had to buy and manage middleware, Celigo, to move data between them.

"After going with NetSuite, we realized there were just delayed transactions. The way they have to run, every fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes things are syncing," Gallman explains. "The timing of a Shopify order to go all the way into ShipStation to pick, pack, and ship, and then get the order confirmation back to Shopify, could be anywhere from fifteen minutes to thirty to forty-five minutes. The timing and the management of that was a lot of work."

See related: Fulfil vs. NetSuite for eCommerce brands

An ERP admin salary Enso never planned for

Managing those integrations wasn't a part-time job. "We basically had to have an ERP admin dedicated to the integrations between those systems," says Gallman. "If something went wrong, if orders weren't flowing correctly, there was a lot of time and effort being spent on the administration side of things. That was a cost we did not realize when we made the decision to go with NetSuite."

He puts a number on it: "You're talking an admin is at least a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five thousand, maybe even a hundred and fifty thousand dollar salary." Enso avoided a new hire only because its supply chain lead was able to learn both the finance and manufacturing sides of NetSuite. "Not every company is going to have that ability, and they might have to completely outsource that admin."

Developers for every gap

Enso's mix of products made it worse. "We always struggled between finding a system that could accommodate our widespread manufacturing and our high SKU counts," says Elliot King, Business Intelligence Analyst. "NetSuite was extremely powerful, but you always had to pay some developer to build some custom script or some app in order to get the functionality that you wanted. Prior to Fulfil, it was a lot of work with developers to build bespoke solutions for a tool that was probably too big for where we were as a company at the time."

WMS priced out of reach, and prices that kept rising

There was one more gap. When Enso signed with NetSuite, warehouse management was a separate paid add-on. The plan was to go live on the ERP first and add WMS later. "That proved problematic due to the costs," Gallman says. "As a company, we just couldn't see spending that much money over time to get the WMS software." So Enso ran without it, and the warehouse stayed on paper. Meanwhile, Gallman notes, "NetSuite continued to raise the price, and it just didn't sit well."

"Ultimately it was the time, the effort, and then the money that were the big key factors. It just did not pan out the way we thought it would."

The Decision: Coming Back to Fulfil

When Enso decided to switch ERPs again, they went back to the team they'd nearly chosen the first time. Rajen at Fulfil had stayed in touch with Austin May and Mike Gallman through all three and a half years on NetSuite.

"We like to have good relationships with our partners and vendors," May says. "NetSuite is a behemoth of a system, and they brought a lot of great things to the table, but we just didn't feel we had that family atmosphere. Rajen and I had stayed in touch since our initial review of ERP systems, so it was a natural fit for me to reach back out."

The deciding factor wasn't a feature checklist. It was confidence in the people. "There was an extreme amount of confidence dealing with Rajen and Kabir, and meeting with Sharoon," Gallman says. "Sharoon had given an extreme amount of confidence in the process. My team had already been through an ERP implementation and knew what they were up against. I trusted my team, and I trusted the leaders at Fulfil."

An implementation with no surprises

This time, the work didn't all land on Enso's team. "Fulfil was definitely more hands-on than we were used to. They took work off my plate," May says. "They asked all the right questions. One of my favorite things was there was nothing that really caught us off guard. There was nothing in the setup process that was like, oh wait, we didn't scope this out properly, you might have something else you need to pay for to make the system work for you. It went very smooth."

J.J. Dilworth, Operations Manager, has been through three or four ERP implementations over the years. "By far, Fulfil was the easiest one I've ever experienced, and I think the team would say that too."

The Impact: One System, Without the Overhead

The single biggest difference was removing the middleware. Shopify orders now flow straight into Fulfil, and Fulfil replaced ShipStation for shipping.

"When a Shopify order goes in, I can see that in Fulfil within seconds, if not immediately," Gallman says. "I'm not having to send it through middleware down to ShipStation. Fulfil is replacing ShipStation, so we no longer need that software. If an order is changed or something needs to be edited, it's immediate. And we don't need the ERP administration costs we were spending before. That's probably the biggest factor that helped us recognize that, at the size of company we are, NetSuite was the wrong option for us."

See related: ERP for Shopify jewelry and accessories brands

$80–90K a year in labor savings, before software

The financial impact was concrete. "With the process, we were probably able to save around eighty to ninety thousand dollars a year in labor costs switching from NetSuite to Fulfil," Gallman says.

On top of that, dropping the Celigo middleware removed "an additional thirty-something thousand," and on ERP software cost alone, comparing NetSuite to Fulfil, Gallman estimates "you're probably close to another fifty to sixty thousand dollars."

Paperless picking, 30%+ faster

Before Fulfil's WMS, the warehouse printed the shipping label and pick list together. "So it instantly showed that it was shipped, which it wasn't," Dilworth says. "And the pickers would pick off of a description instead of a SKU. There were inventory discrepancies. It was pretty crazy."

Today, pickers work by bin location on a handheld, with every pick scanned and verified. "Now we're picking by location. There's no description, there's no SKU on it. It's just a location," Dilworth says. "That has been a game changer for us. We've seen probably a 30% increase, it might even be 40, as far as pick times."

With enough bins to pick around 1,200 orders before pack-out, the team picks in the first half of the day and packs in the second.

See related: Batch picking in Fulfil's WMS

New staff productive the same day

Training used to be the bottleneck. "It would be weeks and weeks before a new person was up to speed, because there was nothing that told us what package to put it in," Dilworth says. "It was all knowledge-based."

Now new pickers are productive the same day. "The biggest thing is getting them used to the handheld and the prompts," Dilworth says. "During our busy season, we recruit employees from different departments to help out, and it's as easy as press this button and it'll tell you what to do after that."

Jace Johnson, Logistics & Fulfillment Manager, saw it firsthand. Johnson joined in mid-November and stepped straight onto the line as a picker and packer to support the team through the holidays. "I was expecting the worst," Johnson says. "But the way Fulfil walks you through the picking and packing process, it corrects any mistake that could be made by picking the wrong product or the wrong bin location. It has hard stops in place for all of those. The learning curve was so short compared to previous ERP and WMS systems I've worked in."

Gallman puts it simply: "I could go down on the fulfillment line, grab a handheld, and be picking orders within a few minutes."

The right ring in the right box

For a brand shipping licensed products, packaging mistakes are visible to customers. "We used to hear it all the time," Dilworth says. "A customer ordered a Disney ring, and it came in a Lord of the Rings package. I haven't heard of that since." At pack-out, Fulfil now shows an image of the product and the packaging it needs to go in.

Enso's own team tailors those screens. "Just last week, one of our guys made the font size bigger, so the ring size shows and the package it's supposed to go in. It says it's going in a Disney box, a Star Wars box," Gallman says. "He was able to modify it so it highlights a color so you know you're picking two rings instead of one. With NetSuite, that would have been a huge administration cost. Could NetSuite have done it? Probably. But who could have done it? With Fulfil, we can change things really quick and modify it for all the users."

Scan, verify, and automated bin replenishment

The same scan-and-verify discipline now covers inventory moves, not just picks. "Previously, a lot of everything we did was in Google Sheets, and it was brought over on paper," Johnson says. "We'd count bins or move inventory, and then the digital transfer took effect after the physical movement. There's this lag where inventory can move, and all of a sudden the inventory is no longer correct."

Now, when an internal shipment arrives from manufacturing or quality assurance, the team scans it on the handheld, Fulfil tells them the bin it belongs in, and the put-away is scanned and verified. "You have all these hard stops in place that prevent the wrong inventory ending up in the wrong bin."

Pick faces stay small and stocked automatically. "Those bin transfers automatically populate based on a minimum and a maximum that we put in place," Johnson says. "They come in daily, my team picks them, fills them up, and we're ready for orders that day."

See related: Directed putaway

Manufacturing and engraving in the same flow

Production starts with a schedule for two shifts, with work orders built the day before. Engraving runs two ways. Dynamic engraving skips work orders entirely: rings are picked from a pick list, and the customer's custom text pulls automatically into the engraving station. Etched designs follow a fuller path. "The ring first has to be produced by our production team, then it goes into quality, then into fulfillment where it's stored," Dilworth explains. "An internal shipment gets made so it can be pulled from fulfillment when needed. It goes to engraving, a work order is processed, then it goes back into quality and then to fulfillment, ready to sell."

See related: Manufacturing in Fulfil

Finance: Brand-Level P&Ls and Royalty Reporting

Enso's finance team is four people. Fulfil keeps the volume manageable by bringing every sales channel into the same books. "We have connections with Shopify, Amazon, and EDI platforms, and those integrations have been very smooth, with very few hiccups," says Tanner Moss, Director of Finance. "It makes it easier for us to account for things and make sure all the transactions are captured in the system every month."

See related: General Ledger and EDI

Multi-entity and multi-brand in one system

Enso's structure isn't a textbook one. "We have a standard subsidiary setup, one company and multiple subsidiaries, but we also have brands that live within one single subsidiary," King explains. "We've been able to use custom attribute fields to build reporting that runs off the SQL in the back end to rebuild an income statement, so we can see if one brand is performing well in one area or another. There's a lot of work with allocation templates to make sure things get distributed where they ought to be. But once you put in the work setting up the automations, it flows pretty smoothly."

See related: Managing multiple entities in one ERP

Licensing royalties from the data warehouse

Licensing is a big part of Enso's business, and every licensor wants something different. "Fulfil is the source of truth for transactions," King says. "Each of our royalty partners has very distinct reporting requirements. One royalty report that works for Disney and Marvel does not work for Pokémon, and it doesn't work the same for the NFL. Having access to the underlying data structure in BigQuery has been critical. It lets us build custom reporting that exports our data in a format that's easy to use for each licensor's template."

Moss's team owns royalty reporting and forecasting. "We use the data warehouse and BigQuery to pull those reports monthly for our accrual and quarterly for our licensors," Moss says. "We have those reports dialed in to mirror the formatting requirements our licensing partners require. We review them before sending them off, and cross-reference with the subsystem if we have any questions. It's very smooth."

See related: Fulfil's data warehouse

Building a Platform for Acquisitions

When Enso chose Fulfil, part of the thesis was future growth. "We knew it had the potential for if we were ever to do an acquisition," Gallman says. "We had the capability to have future companies we acquired all be on Fulfil, all utilizing one software."

That thesis got tested fast. In 2026, Enso acquired two companies, Lokai and Your Bag Tag, signing them at the end of February and in April. Neither was a natural fit for silicone-ring manufacturing; Your Bag Tag makes luggage and scuba tags with embroidery. But Enso knew how to run manufacturing, and Fulfil gave them the confidence to fold the new brands into their own operation.

"With Fulfil, we were able to confidently say: you don't need that software, we don't need the 3PL, we can do all of this," Gallman says. Lokai had been using a third-party logistics provider; as of June 1, 2026, Enso fulfills all of Lokai's shipments out of its own facility with Fulfil.

Onboarding Lokai on a compressed timeline

May expected a heavy lift. "Most ERP implementations, when you add another subsidiary, it's a lot of work. It's basically a full build-out. I told the company we might need to prepare for that," May says. "But we did crunch the timelines, and it went very smooth, because there's no additional cost for add-ons like new Shopify stores or Amazon storefronts. Everything was already set up on our current Shopify and Amazon stores. We just had to set up the new ones, connect them, do a little plug and play for certain GL-impacting fields, and it flowed really smoothly."

In the warehouse, adding Lokai's finished goods was, in Dilworth's words, "just like adding another SKU." Automation rules separate Enso and Lokai orders into different batches, and SKU naming tells the team at a glance which brand a product belongs to. "It hasn't been tough," Dilworth says, "other than adding 7,000 more SKUs."

For the people on the floor, every brand runs through the same process. "Finance keeps everything separate where it needs to be separate," Johnson says. "But for the warehouse employee, they don't see a different brand and think they have to do something completely different. It eliminates that long learning curve of all these different brands."

"What did Fulfil give us? It gave us the confidence that we could purchase other companies and duplicate and replicate what we're currently doing," Gallman says. "Using our own fulfillment services has become one of our strengths, and that's in conjunction with using Fulfil."

See related: Run two Shopify stores from one warehouse

Moving Faster with AI

AI is now part of daily work at Enso, across finance and operations. "Claude has been a big part of what we're doing, and to see that you guys are using Claude as well has streamlined some things," Gallman says. "We're definitely moving faster with the AI you've implemented."

Moss uses Claude connected to Fulfil almost every day. "I query it for quick questions like cost of goods sold, what's our average cost for all products or different categories of products," Moss says. "I also use it on the accounting side during month-end, even preparing journal entries. It saves a lot of time. I don't feel like I have to know a lot of SQL or any technical language to pull what I need. I can just put it into a Claude prompt and it gives me what I need."

May connects Claude to Fulfil through the API and Fulfil's MCP, and builds micro apps for the rest of the company. "It's allowed me to automate certain things I'm doing on the regular," May says. "It's allowed team members and other coworkers to automatically get data out of Fulfil, automatically execute certain processes, find things that need to be cleaned up, and keep an eye on things that need to be looked over. A couple of them have made workloads for people in other departments much faster."

King uses Fulfil's help documentation as context for Claude projects when designing new reports: "Here are all the available fields in the data warehouse. How should we join external data that lives outside of Fulfil into something that's repeatable?"

See related: AI in Fulfil

The Partnership: A Personal Touch NetSuite Couldn't Match

Ask Gallman about his favorite part of Fulfil and he talks about people, not features. Early in the relationship, Sharoon, Fulfil's CEO, came out and walked the fulfillment line in person.

"He was actually on our fulfillment line watching how we were picking and packing and shipping our orders," Gallman recalls. "He'd immediately go, we can change that really fast, make a phone call, something's changed on the back end, and boom, we've made the process even better. You're not going to get that at NetSuite. You're not going to get someone coming out here spending the time and effort to make your fulfillment process more streamlined. That was another big identifier that this was the right decision."

That access is the through-line. "The biggest thing the partnership brings is the experience of working directly with Sharoon and Rajen and top leadership," Gallman says. "It's a personal touch, and that personal touch goes a long way. There's never this frustration of, I can't talk to anyone at Fulfil, they're too big. At NetSuite, who do you call? You call their rep? You got a new rep every three to six months. In three years, I don't know how many reps I had."

Moss draws the same contrast. "Customer service is the best thing I would highlight about Fulfil in comparison to NetSuite," Moss says. "We just didn't have the best experience with customer service at NetSuite. It's a night and day difference with Fulfil."

See related: Why we visit merchants onsite

Support tickets that actually get resolved

The support model lifts a real burden off leadership. "When my team creates support tickets, they truly feel that they get resolved," Gallman says. "My team is not asking me to solve them. They're going directly to Fulfil and solving the issues. That's a huge benefit for me. I'm not wasting my time going, gosh, now I've got to go get an admin or someone that understands Fulfil. You guys take care of it, and it is a huge burden lifted off my shoulders."

Why Manufacturers and DTC Brands Choose Fulfil as a NetSuite Alternative

Enso Rings' experience maps to a pattern Fulfil sees often with vertically integrated, high-complexity brands evaluating a manufacturing ERP with a built-in WMS:

• Native integration, not middleware: Shopify and Amazon connect directly, with no Celigo layer to buy, babysit, or blame when orders stall.
• No dedicated ERP admin tax: The six-figure integration-admin role NetSuite effectively required isn't needed.
• WMS included, not an add-on: Warehouse management, handheld scanning, and pick, scan, verify came as part of the system, not a separate purchase Enso had to defer.
• Configurable by your own team: Pick screens, layouts, and workflows change in minutes, not through a costly administration project.
• Built for in-house manufacturing and licensed products: Manufacturing, engraving, and royalty-bearing SKUs run alongside DTC, Amazon, and wholesale in one system, with royalty reports built from the data warehouse.
• A real partnership: Direct access to Fulfil's leadership and a support team that resolves tickets, not a new account rep every quarter.
• A platform for M&A: One system Enso can extend to every company it acquires, adding storefronts and SKUs without a full rebuild, new software, or a 3PL.

Enso Rings tried the behemoth, paid for the middleware, and carried the admin overhead. Then they ripped it out, moved to Fulfil, and turned their own operations into a growth engine.

As Gallman puts it to any operator about to sign with NetSuite: "Tell them to call me."