Bringing Products to the People with ERP Systems

Successful retailers ensure that customers have access to products when and where they want them. To make this happen, it’s necessary to effectively manage and share data, enabling employees to make intelligent decisions based on real information. One way to achieve this is by integrating various business processes using an ERP solution.

An ERP platform displays operational details for your entire business as a single, intuitive “dashboard” that your employees can access from any location in real time. Signs that your company has outgrown its current method of data management include:

• Multiple IT solutions in multiple locations, all handling different parts of your operation, all requiring attention, maintenance, and employee training (How often do you flip between applications to get work done?)
• Missing or incomplete data and analytics
• Slow or inaccurate accounting

As long as you continue to use a data management strategy with these shortcomings, you will fail to achieve your core business objective: getting products to customers.

Can an ERP System Solve These Problems?

Yes, most definitely. However, that doesn’t mean that your existing IT infrastructure is obsolete. In many cases, a correctly implemented ERP platform complements existing solutions such as Office 365 or SQL servers. For this reason, choosing a knowledgeable and experienced partner for your implementation is crucial (especially when it comes to avoiding data loss and disruption during the transition). A good implementation partner is also integral to ensuring that your employees understand, feel comfortable with, and quickly adopt the new solution.

One of the most immediate and obvious benefits of adopting an ERP solution is the way it simplifies your business processes. The benefits of accomplishing more in fewer steps will be felt by your employees across departments. While some workers might initially feel uncomfortable with the amount of tracking and reporting performed by ERP systems, this can be alleviated by liaising with employees and collecting feedback.

Leading ERP solutions also include retail business intelligence software, which leads to a deeper understanding of how the different parts of your business work together and how these processes can improve in the future. Key business intelligence features such as data cubes and access to standard, ad hoc, and analytical reports are essential for data-driven decisions.

Choosing the Right ERP for Your Business

Retailers face challenges that many other industries don’t have to consider, like merchandising, product assortment, and customer engagement. Compared to other industries, the consequences of isolating any of these processes is much more severe. These inter-process ripple effects can be mitigated using some retail-specific functions that your ERP system should possess (in addition to core ERP capabilities), including POS integration, supply chain management, and merchandising.

An ERP solution will also improve your CRM activities and the overall customer experience. Having the right ERP system can greatly improve customer loyalty and engagement by alleviating major stressors that impact the performance of your customer service and outward-facing marketing teams. Some efforts that an ERP platform can assist with include:

• Loyalty programs
• Personalized offers – in-store, online, and wherever the buyer may be
• After-sales support
• Social messaging and community management
• Channel and brand consistency

When used together, these capabilities can drastically improve your overall buyer experience, contributing to increased loyalty and engagement.

Conclusion

Bringing together goods and customers in the best way possible can only be achieved via the seamless integration of various retail processes. An ERP system is a highly effective way to manage these processes, making them easily accessible by the right decision makers across locations and business functions.

To discover whether implementing an ERP solution is the right choice for your business, please contact Visionet Systems for your free consultation.

How technology is driving retail in Africa?

The retail sector in Africa is changing rapidly, as e-commerce opens up opportunities for both companies and consumers. Smartphones are increasingly used by consumers as a gateway tool to the internet, facilitating the growth of online retail in powerful ways. In this white paper we assess the opportunities offered to retail markets, and the barriers to e-commerce growth for the continent.

The Economist Intelligence Unit helps business leaders prepare for opportunity, empowering them to act with confidence when making strategic decisions. We are renowned for our comprehensive global coverage and use the best analytical minds to examine markets, countries and industries with a level of insight you cannot find elsewhere. Uncompromising integrity, relentless rigour and precise communication underpin everything we do. We are meticulous with every analysis, every study, every projection and every commentary that carries the EIU brand. Our reputation for trusted business intelligence depends on it. Crystallise your thinking and see greater possibilities with business intelligence from the EIU–the most assured way to prepare for opportunity.

Source: https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=Africa2017

How integrated EDI improves data visibility and shortens order cycles

Because of an increasingly complex supply chain, finance and supply managers in manufacturing and retail organizations face significant challenges finding and maintaining accurate inventory and delivery information. With important product information locked away in specific information systems, managers can’t easily determine item availability or report customer demand. They have to spend a lot of time coordinating with vendors over the phone or via email each time they need up-to-date delivery information.

Every additional vendor or supplier along the supply chain makes it more difficult to coordinate and keep all information in-sync. Each step upstream from the customer amplifies the bullwhip effect, resulting in highly inaccurate demand forecasts and inefficient order fulfillment. Improving information accuracy and eliminating delays in communication help to mitigate the bullwhip effect and vastly improve supply chain coordination.

The importance of simple, direct communication

Modern digital tools are the key to improving this situation by simplifying inter-partner communication along the supply chain. Instead of relying on ad hoc systems that use spreadsheets and email to keep track of information from suppliers, retail and manufacturing organizations need robust information platforms that are directly integrated with electronic communication channels.

Older partner organizations that digitized their records decades ago might still use traditional EDI standards that relay information to partners using a value-added network, or VAN. These systems are often industry-specific, like flight inquiry software or electronic stock tickers. Whether your vendors use these older systems or newer B2B communication standards like XML or JSON to exchange information, you should look for a single solution with multi-format support. The goal is to simplify and reduce the cost of data interchange by using as few moving parts as possible.

Just as importantly, the solution you implement shouldn’t be a stand-alone system that requires a user to key in data for transmission. Instead, it should receive all information directly and automatically from your internal business software (typically an ERP platform). Users should be able to simply select the information they would like to send, specify the intended recipients of this information, and click a button.

Furthermore, the communication solution should also allow your organization to send information to partners on a fixed schedule, or when particular conditions are triggered. You might want to send weekly performance reports, or initiate an order whenever stock levels in your distribution centers dip below a specific threshold. The system should support batch jobs that let you send multiple documents to multiple partners with a single click. The more ways an information exchange application offers for automating partner communication, the better.

Making full use of incoming partner information

Information that you receive from your vendors and partners is just as important as the information you send. Using an ERP-integrated solution is fully effective only if it’s implemented in both directions. Any digital information you receive from suppliers and other vendors should be sent directly to your ERP system so that your internal records are always accurate. Since ERP platforms typically offer advanced data visualization and forecasting capabilities, raw partner data received via integrated supply chain communication can easily be converted into meaningful insights.

Integrating partner information in both directions sets up direct, automated communication between both parties’ ERP systems, which eliminates a great deal of manual activity and opportunity for human error. That means less rekeying, fewer delays, and more accurate inventory and delivery information.

Enabling faster communication between partners by eliminating unnecessary steps and directly connecting their enterprise software is a great way to ensure accurate, up-to-date information about your products and logistics. PartnerLink by Visionet is a great example of a full-featured tool for both EDI and non-EDI organizations. You won’t have to rely on guesswork, and order fulfillment and replenishment will take significantly less time. For detailed information on how your specific technology infrastructure will interface with that of your supply chain partners, please contact Visionet Systems for a complimentary consultation.

Improving Data Management for Retail Excellence

When your retail strategy empowers employees through data and analytics, you enhance every aspect of their workday, which in turn leads to a better customer experience.

Enabling these enhancements requires a data management solution that is effective, efficient, and in a form that can be accessed quickly and easily by key employees in your retail business. Such data accessibility can be profitable, too – the global retail industry stands to gain an additional $94B in revenue over four years by taking full advantage of their data[1].

In this post, we’ll look at several major data management considerations for retail, including the key differences between ERP and EAI, choosing the right ERP, and a brief look at business intelligence.

ERP & EAI
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) are two popular solutions to data management woes, but in very different ways. For many large retailers, the question isn’t which of these two solutions they should use, but rather how to implement both of them most effectively.
An ERP platform is a single software application that integrates major business functions that span across core operations. This is where the collection and organization of all your data occurs. EAI, on the other hand, is a framework that takes multiple platforms and allows them to communicate, integrating the data between these different information systems that would otherwise be isolated in “data silos”. One important benefit of EAI, in addition to the core importance of communicating data, is that it allows companies to make the most of their pre-existing IT investments – a huge initial cost-saving measure.

Fear of disruption?
Sometimes companies are hesitant to implement these two very powerful solutions because of the risk of data loss or disruption. These risks can be avoided by choosing the right partner for your implementation efforts and having them available for employee support before, during, and after the implementation. Though it may seem obvious, having a clear idea from the beginning (and sticking to it) will prevent hours of headaches down the line.

One major prerequisite for successful implementing ERP and EAI is selecting the right ERP platform for your industry – one that can help you from a general operational standpoint by providing the tools you need to face problems specific to your line of business. For retailers, some examples of features that should come standard include:

• POS management
• E-commerce utilities such as destination-based taxation and real-time inventory updates
• Contact center capabilities
• Marketing - content and campaign management
• Social monitoring
• Store operations - statement reconciliation and pricing management
• Supply chain and logistics
• Sales force automation
• Financial management
• HR - payroll and related tasks
• Business intelligence (BI)

Working together, these functions are essential for any retail business looking to create a memorable shopping experience that attracts loyal and engaged customers.
Making Data Usable
Having all the data in the world is useless if it doesn’t produce actionable results. BI is the process of taking raw data, giving it context, and arriving at one version of truth – and doing it an understandable way using a real-time “dashboard” that contains visualizations, graphs, and charts.
For retail analytics, BI can be integral in a number of ways, especially in customer investigation that helps enhance the buying experience. It can also be used to understand the relationship between purchasing patterns and other essential measurements across geographical locations. As BI is an ongoing process, particularly with regards to data updates within an enterprise data warehouse, having the right ongoing support from consultants can completely change your employee experience.
Conclusion
Better customer data management leads to a better customer experience and can have a positive impact that is felt tenfold across your entire business. So transitioning to a solution that enhances data management is well worth the necessary time and effort. Don’t let concerns about disruption keep your business from making this very essential transition, since deciding to wait will only lead to an increasingly complicated environment in the future.
To find out how better data management can give your entire retail business a boost, be sure to write to us at sales@visionetsystems.com for your complimentary consultation.

Fending Off the 'Retail Apocalypse' Through Digital Transformation

Despite the fact that the economy is strong and American consumers are shopping in full force, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers across the United States are continuing their nosedives into bankruptcy.

This so-called “retail apocalypse” began in 2016 when major retailers began shuttering their brick-and-mortar locations by the thousands. Sears has fewer than a third the number of retail stores it had ten years ago. Walmart just closed 63 Sam’s Club stores. Macy’s closed 68 stores last year and J.C. Penney closed more than 100. Payless filed for bankruptcy, and half of the malls in the U.S. are predicted to close by 2023. To date, 4,000 physical stores have been affected and another 6,800 will close in 2018—more closures than we’ve seen since the recession ten years ago.

Why? Because Americans continue to do more and more shopping online. The figure has been creeping up every year, and now consumers do more than half of their shopping online.
Unsurprisingly, Amazon is the biggest beneficiary of this trend.  Morgan Stanley just predicted that Amazon could become the world's first company worth $1 trillion —and it’s already achieved more than double the market value of Walmart.

Indeed, by 2021 Amazon is projected to make up half of the online marketplace.

Retailers may well feel like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, but all is not lost. Here are a few tips to stave off the apocalypse.

Get Seamless Across Devices

If you’re a 21st-century retailer, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you already have a website up and running that provides an amazing shopping experience for your customers regardless of whether they are using traditional desktop computers or mobile devices.

But you may not realize just how critical it is that your website loads quickly, and is easy and intuitive to use. A study from digital performance management company SOASTA found that optimal load time to achieve peak conversion and revenue ranged by device from 1.8 to 2.7 seconds. Google found that more than half of mobile site visitors will leave a page that fails to load in three seconds.

Gabriel Coelho-Kostolny, Director of Product Marketing at digital experience company Instart Logic, says that to maximize revenue, retailers should focus on delivering a beautiful experience that is also reliably fast. The website must adapt gracefully to different browsers, device types, networks and screen sizes, providing the best possible experience for every customer.

“Tools like Blue Triangle and SOASTA help retailers measure their customers’ experiences while digital experience management platforms like Instart Logic make those experiences better," says Coelho-Kostolny. "The most important thing is that a retail site is beautiful, easy and intuitive to use, and fast—we process 12 billion transactions per day, so we can see clearly that site performance and conversion are directly related.”

Get In Front Of The Right Customers

SEO used to be a keyword game. But the game has changed.

Nowadays, Google uses RankBrain, a machine-learning artificial intelligence system designed to answer queries based on search history and context instead of simple word matches. Google isn’t even using keywords as a primary directive anymore. This provides an opportunity for brands to use SEO as a marketing tool, but it requires that they are optimizing in the right way.

“Today, SEO is about finding the right customers—it’s not just about showing up in the search results, but about getting your brand in front of the people who are actually looking for it,” explained Dave Chaplin, CEO of SearchDex, an SEO-optimizing agency that specializes in ecommerce. “It’s about making connections. Your website—which is where your brand lives now—must be SEO optimized for discovery. Think about it this way: if a brand is the way a company behaves, then 21st-century SEO is all about brand-building. It’s the first step in building trust between a product and a consumer.”

Make sure your brand is providing valuable content across the web that makes Google “find you” for customers who are seeking your products and services. In this way, a brand is being built on search more than on messaging: content can’t be king without a position in the court.

Make Support Easy and Intuitive

One crucial and often overlooked component of the online and mobile retail experience is customer support. Just as customer service is a key differentiator in brick-and-mortar retail, how a brand handles their online and mobile customer service can be a defining factor in whether or not their customer experience is succeeding.

Consumers don’t want to have to leave an app or site they’re on to call or email customer support. Instead, they want instant answers via instant chat—a mode of communication they increasingly prefer to others.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that customers dread contacting support. So look for solutions like chatbots that help resolve issues in-app, via chat as quickly as possible. If you're going to implement bots, however, ensure that they're efficient and effective at solving problems, and have an option for customers that require deeper levels of support.

The Only Way Out Is Through

As Macbeth, Robert Frost and Jack Donaghy have all said (albeit, with different phrasings): the only way out is through. If retailers are going to survive the retail apocalypse and the Amazon takeover, they’ve got to take digital transformation seriously. The good news is there are plenty of well-tested technologies that are proven to help.

References:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tinamulqueen/2018/02/13/fending-off-the-retail-apocalypse-through-digital-transformation/#4a48602497f2

Creating a Memorable Retail Experience

When customers buy something from a large online retailer like Amazon, they click a few buttons and their product shows up a few days later. That’s great, but today’s customer wants something more from retail brands than the product itself. One of the most substantial ways to differentiate your brand is through your customer experience. Instead of selling customers a product that they can just as easily buy from another retailer, you need to sell the experience surrounding that product.

Here are seven major ways that you can provide a superior experience, attract more customers, and improve brand loyalty:

1: Create a cycle of success for your employees. Having well-trained, content, and confident employees in every department improves customer service. Your business operations do not exist independently of each other, so problems in your accounting department will eventually create problems for your customers. You can avoid these kinds of problems by centralizing all necessary business functions using an ERP system designed especially for retail.

2: Offer great products – and ensure availability. Determine optimal assortments and quantities using business intelligence, social monitoring, and similar tools to ensure that you have sufficient quantities of all the products your customers want.

3: Listen to your customers. In the era of social media and direct customer engagement, there’s no excuse for not knowing what your shoppers want. But don’t ask for their opinions only to ignore them. Instead, really listen. Listening to your customer doesn’t just mean responding to their comments and questions, but also gauging your brand image and whether or not your marketing campaigns are sending the right message.

To simplify the collection of this feedback, connecting a business intelligence solution like Visionet's VisiAnalytics to your omni-channel ERP platform can seamlessly generate critical reports about every aspect of your customer’s journey. You will be able to focus on the specifics of individual customer experiences while also gaining a better overall view of how your operations enable these experiences.

4: Choose the right ERP implementation partner. This minimizes the risk of data loss or disruption. A good technology partner also becomes a valuable resource for your employees when they start using the new system, and provides a complete range of post-implementation ERP services. As an added bonus, the right partner will also help you save money by taking full advantage of your existing IT infrastructure instead of insisting on an expensive “rip and replace” approach.

5: Be where your customers are! There are tons of opportunities to personalize the experience for your customers, ranging from sending in-store promotions straight to their device (35% of global customers use their phones in-store to search for discounts or coupons1), to offering multi-channel customer service. You need to engage each customer using their preferred retail channel and create a shopping experience that matches their tastes from start to finish.

6: Remember that it doesn’t stop with the sale. An existing customer is 50% more likely to try a new product and 31% more likely to spend more than a new customer2, which means that the positive impression that your retail brand can make by creating a positive after-sales experience is priceless. Your existing customers can become your brand’s biggest advocates. After all, are customers more likely to listen to a TV commercial, or a close friend who really loves your brand?

7: Be consistent in your branding, policies, product quality, pricing, and more. If your website mobile app look different, or your customer service representatives provide different information, it confuses your customers as well as your internal operations. Maintain the same company-wide standards, policies, and design language from the beginning, and stick with them. Having a single dashboard for your website, mobile app, social networks, and other branded forms of communication can help you maintain consistency.

Conclusion

Notice how all of these tips focus on the customer experience. In retail today, it’s impossible to compete with giants like Amazon on price or selection. However, smaller retailers can provide a customer experience that goes above and beyond what Amazon can offer. Delivering memorable experiences will become the driving force behind your business success for years to come.

Want to learn more about the best tools and techniques for a winning customer experience strategy? Contact Visionet Systems to schedule your complimentary consultation.

References

1. PwC 2016 Total Retail report

2. https://www.mycustomer.com/experience/loyalty/infographic-customer-acquisition-vs-retention-costs

3 Reasons Why Digital Lending Will Bring You More Sales

In the highly competitive mortgage industry, lenders are constantly on the lookout for effective ways of standing out from their competitors, attracting new customers, growing revenue, and controlling costs. Since there isn’t much room for variation in lending rates, superior customer service becomes a lender’s most compelling means of differentiation. This article explains how digital mortgage tools have become a great way to improve your borrower experience by keeping them informed and engaged, while simultaneously enhancing operational efficiency.

Making an impact on millennials

As the years progress, successful businesses adjust their offerings to suit the tastes and temperaments of each emerging generation. The growing economic clout of millennials has led banks and other mortgage lenders to aggressively leverage digital channels for promoting their services, communicating with borrowers, and even expediting the mortgage closing cycle itself. The same kinds of digital tools that allowed online retailers and content providers to gain ascendancy are now poised to change the face of consumer lending.

Digital channels represent more than just an alternative means of disseminating product information; they are vehicles for unprecedented levels of direct consumer immersion and brand engagement. Each consumer touchpoint becomes a potential success story or an opportunity for instant word-of-mouth marketing. Embracing the digital realm is a powerful way for lenders to generate high-quality leads through organic borrower referral.

However, it is worth noting that millennials aren’t the only ones using these digital tools. More and more potential homebuyers from all demographics are turning to the Internet as their primary source of research on mortgage lenders, and the vast majority of these potential borrowers prefer a lending process that is driven by digital technologies, including real-time application status updates, convenient document scan-and-submit functionality, and integrated communication management tools that span multiple digital channels. The onus is now on lenders to fulfill these expectations, improve brand perception, and increase their market share.

Pre-qualification portals improve loan quality

Businesses across multiple industries have improved employee productivity while improving customer satisfaction at the same time by offering self-service options using personalized web portals. Customers can use their computers or mobile devices to check their order status, update shipping and billing information, open new service requests, and so on. This takes less time, costs less, and is much more engaging than dedicating a small customer service team to processing these types of customer requests.

The mortgage industry is also taking advantage of self-serve portals to manage customer service workloads and costs. However, lenders can also benefit by implementing consumer-facing portals at the beginning of origination cycle: pre-qualification. By allowing potential borrowers to submit their documents and verifying their quality and completeness, lenders can save hundreds of paperwork-hours every week and quickly identify problematic loan applications with minimal effort. Pre-qualification portals improve document accuracy and reduce business risk without involving high long-term operating costs.

Mobile apps shorten your closing cycle

While there’s no doubt that smartphone apps appeal to younger consumers, a digital mortgage app isn’t just a gimmick to attract the millennial crowd. A well-designed mortgage app improves multiple aspects of your borrower experience, promotes faster document turn times, and results in more efficient borrower communication.

Lenders have begun using mortgage apps as a channel for loan document submission. A borrower uses their smartphone camera to scan the document, and the app sends the scanned document to the lender. Apps can also keep track of any pending documents in a convenient checklist.

Similarly, digital mortgage apps are quickly becoming the dominant means of informing borrowers about the status of their application, upcoming meetings, or any other type of alert or notification. Sending these requests straight to the device in your borrower’s pocket can shave hours or even days from the mortgage closing cycle, and also provides a sense of security and immediacy that is less pronounced in other digital channels.

The mortgage industry is ramping up its adoption of digital tools and mobile solutions, and lenders that choose to ignore this trend will soon find themselves losing market share to more forward-looking organizations. Lenders should take great care in selecting a technology partner that can deliver well-designed, well-executed digital mortgage solutions that keep borrowers engaged. To learn more about your organization can maximize the impact of your existing technology investments as the digital mortgage landscape continues to evolve, please contact Visionet Systems and schedule a complimentary consultation session.

How Leading EDI Solutions Streamline Operations and Partner Onboarding

CIOs and Heads of IT for manufacturing and retail organizations need to ensure that business information flows smoothly between their organization and its partners and vendors. Frictionless data exchange is critical for efficient operations and strong supplier relationships. However, there’s no guarantee that your supply chain partners use the same information systems, transmission protocols, or data formats as you do, and this can create a lot of extra work and potential for error. You would have to reconcile differences and map data between your own system and each one of your partners individually. Every time you engage with a new vendor, you would have to repeat this exercise. That doesn’t sound like fun.

It pays to choose a partner communication tool that simplifies partner onboarding by offering intelligent data mapping tools that help you avoid noncompliance and expensive chargebacks. Some solutions offer complete automation, while others give you drag-and-drop controls for a more intuitive manual experience. Most solutions also include pre-built business rule templates and management tools that let you customize re-use entire sets of existing business rules instead of having to start from scratch for each partner. These tools will help you cut down on onboarding time. It’s also important to select a solution that goes beyond traditional, VAN-based EDI and allows organizations to communicate with allof their partners, whether or not a specific partner uses traditional EDI data formats and services.

After the new vendor has been added to your EDI system, there are still many opportunities to improve your data interchange operations. Perhaps the most significant improvement comes from integrating your EDI platform with internal business processes. By unifying your ERP and EDI systems, you’ll drastically reduce transfer times, because you’ll be able to send information to your partners from within your ERP system. You won’t have to worry about having information locked away in several different email accounts. There will be no need to manually copy ERP information into a separate EDI system. Whether you need to send POs, invoices, or shipping information, you’ll be able to transmit these documents with just a few clicks.

Integration with ERP systems offer several other advantages to EDI operations. ERP platforms offer a way to centrally manage all EDI activities. Their robust reporting capabilities allow real-time performance monitoring via visually engaging dashboards that can be customized to suit your specific needs. You will receive alerts as soon as specific thresholds are exceeded, which will help you catch transmission issues and exceptions much earlier, potentially preventing hours of rework and thousands of dollars in chargebacks. Since most modern ERP systems can be accessed from any type of device, you can keep track of EDI metrics from your laptop, tablet, or smartphone while you’re on the road.

Leading data interchange solutions are designed to scale to very high volumes, and can transmit thousands of items each day at peak efficiency. Since it is common for organizations to send orders, reports, and other information to their partners and vendors on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis, full-featured EDI solutions include job scheduling capabilities. This can reduce direct human involvement considerably, which leads to increased efficiency and data accuracy. Users can configure the scheduled transmission once and allow the EDI system to automatically keep partners informed at predefined intervals. Most solutions also include support for batch jobs, which improves user productivity by allowing them to send multiple items to one or more partners at the same time.

Taken as a whole, these benefits make it clear why a comprehensive data interchange solution is a must-have for manufacturing and retail companies that regularly communicate with multiple partners. As you partner network and transaction volume grow, an ERP-integrated digital solution will help your business scale up painlessly.

To learn more about how to leverage your existing technology infrastructure to improve supply chain communication, please contact Visionet Systems for a complimentary consultation session.