Improving your supply chain efficiency with ERP-integrated EDI

In an environment of ever-changing consumer demand, your retail or manufacturing business needs to leverage every competitive advantage it has at its disposal. Modern global businesses rely on electronic data interchange (EDI) solutions to maximize operational efficiency and maintain market competitiveness. Businesses are using EDI technology to improve their operational strategy, enhance supply chain management, and improve operational performance.

Most large manufacturers and retailers coordinate their operations via EDI, from sending and receiving purchase orders and invoices to advance ship notices (ASNs) and product transfer reports. Becoming an EDI-capable organization signals to potential trading partners that you are a trustworthy party that uses standards-based supply chain practices, and helps you unlock the door to global trade. However, vast improvements in operational efficiency over paper-based processes is the primary advantage that EDI offers.

Even though EDI promotes uniformity through the use of communication standards, not all EDI solutions are created equal. Many older EDI systems only use one EDI format and don’t support any modern, non-EDI communication standards. Many of these legacy systems (and even some newer “web EDI” solutions) require users to manually key in the information, and may even require them to manually initiate and end the EDI transfer!

These methods, while better than using paper documents and a courier service, are ancient relics from the 20th century, and if your organization still uses this kind of software, you should make it a priority to have it replaced with a supply chain communication solution that integrates directly with your ERP software. Here are three ways that an ERP-integrated EDI solution significantly improves efficiency:

Minimal manual entry

If your EDI system is directly integrated with your ERP platform, then you’ll hardly ever need to manually type information to send it to a vendor (or type received information back into your ERP system). Since all information on your products, pricing, inventory, sales transactions, customers, and deliveries is already stored in your ERP system, you’ll usually be able to select the information you want to send with a few clicks. Then, depending on your operating procedures, you can either transmit that information to the appropriate trading partner right away or add it to a scheduled batch transfer.

More advanced EDI solutions will also confirm that the ERP information that you’re about to send complies with your trading partners’ internal policies for those specific document types. This is definitely much quicker and more convenient than consulting a separate compliance checklist for each vendor every time you transmit information.

After reducing its dependence on manual entry, your organization will spend less time managing information transfers, correcting transcription errors, and running damage control on the consequences of errors you failed to catch in time. You’ll also improve supplier relationships and save a surprising amount of money on EDI chargebacks caused by noncompliant information transfers.

Rapid partner onboarding

A well-designed EDI solution also improves efficiency by speeding up the onboarding of new trading partners. Instead of requiring days of configuration, modern EDI systems use intelligent field-mapping techniques to automatically reconcile your partners’ data and document formats with your own. The sooner you complete the onboarding process, the sooner you experience the benefits of direct B2B communication.

Agile decision making

By connecting your EDI system to your ERP platform, you can start using advanced, ERP-integrated analytics tools to gain a better understanding of your trading partners. In the same way that your ERP system’s dynamic dashboards and advanced reporting capabilities provide actionable insights about your organization’s internal processes, they will also begin providing clear, easy-to-understand intelligence on how each of your vendors is performing. You’ll be able to anticipate and adapt to supply-side changes more quickly, and decision makers will have access to the information they need to respond to emerging opportunities and challenges in real time.

Industry-leading EDI solution providers like PartnerLink provide end-to-end ERP-integrated solutions that drive efficiency by minimizing manual entry, expediting partner onboarding, and enhancing decision-making agility. Please contact the PartnerLink team to learn more.

What are you able to build with your bots?

For that the last ten years, business leaders have seen how rising loan production costs have pushed the burden of maintaining profitability onto people, processes, and margins. Today, loans cost $8,000 to produce, up from $4,200 just seven years ago. That’s why businesses continue to look for new ways to keep their margins healthy.

Business leaders have read about the underlying benefits of robotic process automation (RPA) and its ability to lower cost per loan by automating mundane, repetitive tasks and freeing up employees to perform higher-value work. They have seen RPA lowering costs and gaining momentum in areas like healthcare and manufacturing, and have even witnessed Google Assistant make a hair appointment! All of these advances aim to help you free up time and gain a competitive edge. But where do you start?

Create a roadmap

The best way to identify opportunities isn’t by thinking about technology. Instead, create a “time savings plan” with your sales and operations teams by walking through your current loan process from beginning to end. Take special notes along the chain and look for areas where tasks, paperwork, and wait times gather in pools. Waiting on a person or process to take action? Jot it down for follow-up research.
 

The areas you find probably include a lot of 80/20 items, where 80% is repetitive work that doesn’t vary too much and only the remaining 20% requires higher-level judgment and exception processing to complete. By finding and mapping these pockets, you can start to establish your roadmap and stake out areas for further study.

Set your priorities

Once you have cataloged these areas of opportunity, create a four-quadrant matrix and rank them according to their impact on your enterprise: effort, high to low, and time improvement, high to low. This will help the team find consensus and visualize those items that pop to the surface for maximum benefit. It will also provide clarity on finding small but achievable low-effort/high-time-improvement areas to focus on out the gate, so you can build momentum and muscle memory for the high/high categories down the road.
 

Engage your resources for change

Bring together your teams with IT and Project Management to create an enterprise-wide digital improvement plan and begin designing solutions based on your priorities and technology capabilities, especially for those repetitive tasks that you can automate. This journey offers a great opportunity to enhance your culture and competence in technologies (including RPA), work toward continuous improvement, explore new ways of working, invest in innovations that fit your culture, and set numeric goals to wring out waste in time and cost.
 

Gather your team and set the course

Look inside and outside your organization and the industry for solutions, but inside the industry for mortgage technology partners who understand the mortgage domain and RPA technologies applicable to the industry. Start small with achievable goals and measure progress in hours, costs saved, and possibly revenue gained via new products or services. As you build, consider changes that will streamline operations and better fit RPA processing, and train your staff on how to manage the new digital workforce.
 

There is no finish line

Perhaps a little surprisingly, adding bots to your workforce will lead to role changes for your human team members. Just like new human employees, bots will need to be trained, managed, and moved around as your business requirements evolve. So as you set up new procedures and change existing ones, you’ll need a small team of humans to keep your bots optimally trained and deployed. The cycle of discovering RPA use cases, retraining bots, and adjusting human roles is an ongoing process, and will continue to optimize business processes and improve margins year after year.
 

A new way to enhance your staff is here and ready to build: assign a digital assistant to perform routine and repetitive business tasks. RPA is a well-established opportunity to free up valuable staff time and enterprise expense, and direct the savings back to your bottom line. Though our industry understands that innovation is necessary, uncertainty still exists about where to start. The best way to overcome this challenge is by taking the first step.

3 Ways to Overcome Apparel Supply Chain Uncertainty

Overcome Apparel Supply Chain Uncertainty

One thing that every fashion and apparel business has in common is supply chain partners. Whether you’re an apparel manufacturer, retailer, or wholesaler, you’ll be communicating with a third party at some point in your supply chain.
This means that any hiccup in your communication cycle can hamper the overall delivery chain and may result in unhappy customers. No matter where you’re located, what fashion product you’re selling, or where you’re sourcing your raw material from, if you don’t have the right supply chain collaboration mechanisms in place, you can’t achieve sustainable business growth.
So where does supply chain unreliability come from, and what can you do about it?

Apparel Supply Chain Challenges

There are three primary factors that contribute to supply chain uncertainty:

Longer lead times for imported materials

As the number of well-informed and tech-savvy consumers increases, there is a proportionately higher risk of brand sensitivity. Any stock-outs or quality issues can divert your customers to competing brands that have a more responsive value chain. In other words, since full packed sourcing companies are completely reliant on vendors for the timely delivery of imported materials from multiple vendors to start the production process, the lack of a powerful vendor communication platform can result in longer lead times and put a strain on resources.

Tight delivery schedules due to seasonality

The fashion and apparel industry is replete with seasonal volatility due to holiday shopping, promotions, and sales. While this provides opportunities to attract high order volumes, mismanagement and lack of planning can have a negative impact on brand image and lead to permanent loss of sales. This creates a need for a flexible tool that offers more than just basic collaboration with vendors. It must provide near-instant response times and a complete view of all key performance indicators.

Inability to accurately estimate customer demand

Failure to predict what will sell the most, identify items that will soon go out of fashion, or discover new and lucrative consumer segments can cause companies to over-source materials that might not translate into sales, or under-source materials for products that may be in high demand. Organizations that base their estimates on guesswork instead of using data and technology expose themselves to profit erosion.

3 Ways to Reinforce Reliability

You can tackle these challenges by implementing a fully connected and integrated vendor collaboration structure across the following supply chain segments:

Production Planning

Using advanced analytics to project production plans according to consumer demand and identifying production issues earlier in the cycle through a well-connected business ecosystem will provide visibility to all of your vendors. This will help them plan for fallback material in advance and align on quick deliveries during highly volatile periods.

Seamless Order Issuance

Reduce steps from receiving production estimates to placing purchase requests, tracking orders, and clearing invoices by making sure that all data is aggregated in one place and is transparent to all third parties. You can accomplish this by reducing communication via email and auto-syncing business activities between your vendors’ systems and your own. This will reinforce proactivity and reduce last-minute deliveries and fulfilments, because all of your orders will be accurately placed in the right quantities with the right vendors at the right time.

Milestone Tracking

By bridging the gap between obtaining each order status from your internal supply chain department and following up with different vendors, advanced vendor collaboration technologies offer your organization the ability to track deep vendor milestones with automated notifications for any anticipated delays in predefined timeframes.
Your apparel firm needs more than just basic collaboration tools to gain the exceptional agility and market response time required in this industry. Join our experts at Visionet for an insightful webinar and learn more about how your fashion and apparel brand can maintain closer collaboration with vendors throughout the production and delivery cycle.
This article was originally published on Visionet Systems Blog

The Right Time to Upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics 365

Wed, Aug 15, 2018 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

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Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 is 10 years old and mainstream support has already ended. Microsoft Dynamics 2012 has some years to go, but are you going to wait that long? In this webinar, ERP experts at Visionet will discuss:

• How to avoid the risk of business downtime and achieve consolidation of CRM and ERP applications and infrastructure
• How to enable digital transformation and create engaging customer experiences, optimize operations, and empower employees
• Key components of a modern ERP
• Top considerations when looking for a platform upgrade partner.

Register for webinar now: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/3011066860861512962

Why understanding your customer journey in the Age of the Customer is critical for success

Understanding customer journey

Online retailers face more competition than ever from the multitude of online competitors vying for a share of each customer’s wallet. With so many options so readily available, the convenience that online shoppers enjoy has become a challenge for retailers – the customer’s “switching cost” has become nonexistent. In other words, when every online store is just a click away, they all become interchangeable in the eyes of the customer.

This has caused retail models of the past to evaporate, and successful retail brands are constantly on the lookout for new ways to differentiate themselves from their competition. One way that successful retailers accomplish this is by tailoring their brand’s touchpoints to the tastes and preferences of their ideal audience.

Identifying your ideal customer personas is an important part of any modern retail strategy. It provides some important insights into the types of people who would be interested in buying your product. Taken on its own, however, simply knowing who to market your products to doesn’t provide a complete answer… it doesn’t provide much information on how these personas reach the decision to buy your product. For that, you need to map your customer journey.

In the same way that buyer personas provide an in-depth understanding of each type of potential customer, a customer journey provides a comprehensive map of the branching decisions that people make over the entire length of the customer lifecycle. Since different customer personas shop and browse differently, each customer’s journey will be different.

A complete customer journey begins with the customer’s initial interest in an item or contact with your brand, includes every touchpoint they could encounter decision pathway they could take, and extends beyond the actual product purchase, because delivery, after-sales service, and organic, word-of-mouth product endorsement are all important parts of the customer experience. Knowing the subtle ways in which shoppers meander through your world is crucial to reaching as many potential customers as possible and making the most of each touchpoint.

Creating a complete map of your user journey forces you to carefully consider each potential customer interaction, both deliberate and unplanned, and ask yourself what you can do to maximize the chances of guiding people closer and closer to conversion. As for customers that have completed their purchase, your goal changes to ensuring complete satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat business.

While you won’t find a single, one-size-fits-all solution that applies to all businesses (or even all products sold by the same business), the best way to map your customer journey is to ask what it would take at each touchpoint to convince a shopper to proceed to the next phase. The answer to this series of questions will give your brand’s user experience (UX) a clear and well-defined direction.

Visionet’s UX experts help map your organization’s customer journey to identify and create optimal customer experiences that enable you to meet aggressive revenue goals across digital channels. Our creative team provides expertise in UX, information architecture, and creative design that optimize your brand’s digital customer experience.

When combined with our eCommerce technology, digital strategy, and digital marketing services, Visionet UX can help you revitalize each facet of your global brand’s digital footprint.

This article was originally published on Visionet Systems blog

Why understanding your customer journey in the Age of the Customer is critical for success

Online retailers face more competition than ever from the multitude of online competitors vying for a share of each customer’s wallet. With so many options so readily available, the convenience that online shoppers enjoy has become a challenge for retailers – the customer’s “switching cost” has become nonexistent. In other words, when every online store is just a click away, they all become interchangeable in the eyes of the customer.

This has caused retail models of the past to evaporate, and successful retail brands are constantly on the lookout for new ways to differentiate themselves from their competition. One way that successful retailers accomplish this is by tailoring their brand’s touchpoints to the tastes and preferences of their ideal audience.

Identifying your ideal customer personas is an important part of any modern retail strategy. It provides some important insights into the types of people who would be interested in buying your product. Taken on its own, however, simply knowing who to market your products to doesn’t provide a complete answer… it doesn’t provide much information on how these personas reach the decision to buy your product. For that, you need to map your customer journey.

In the same way that buyer personas provide an in-depth understanding of each type of potential customer, a customer journey provides a comprehensive map of the branching decisions that people make over the entire length of the customer lifecycle. Since different customer personas shop and browse differently, each customer’s journey will be different.

A complete customer journey begins with the customer’s initial interest in an item or contact with your brand, includes every touchpoint they could encounter decision pathway they could take, and extends beyond the actual product purchase, because delivery, after-sales service, and organic, word-of-mouth product endorsement are all important parts of the customer experience. Knowing the subtle ways in which shoppers meander through your world is crucial to reaching as many potential customers as possible and making the most of each touchpoint.

Creating a complete map of your user journey forces you to carefully consider each potential customer interaction, both deliberate and unplanned, and ask yourself what you can do to maximize the chances of guiding people closer and closer to conversion. As for customers that have completed their purchase, your goal changes to ensuring complete satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat business.

While you won’t find a single, one-size-fits-all solution that applies to all businesses (or even all products sold by the same business), the best way to map your customer journey is to ask what it would take at each touchpoint to convince a shopper to proceed to the next phase. The answer to this series of questions will give your brand’s user experience (UX) a clear and well-defined direction.

Visionet’s UX experts help map your organization’s customer journey to identify and create optimal customer experiences that enable you to meet aggressive revenue goals across digital channels. Our creative team provides expertise in UX, information architecture, and creative design that optimize your brand’s digital customer experience.

When combined with our eCommerce technology, digital strategy, and digital marketing services, Visionet UX can help you revitalize each facet of your global brand’s digital footprint. Please contact Visionet Systems to learn more.

Solving common supply chain communication issues with specialized digital solutions

The success of your business is inextricably linked to the performance of your supply chain. Even intermittent hiccups in replenishment schedules or minor inaccuracies in demand forecasting can quickly become sources of uncertainty, fulfillment delays, and major business risk. Keeping in constant contact with your suppliers and other vendors is the simplest way to avoid these issues.

However, exchanging complex business requirements and important documents comes with challenges of its own. Here are a few supply chain communication issues that retailers commonly experience, and ways that dedicated digital solutions address these challenges.

Poor Document Management

Many businesses rely heavily on email for a wide range of day-to-day business processes, including coordinating orders and invoices with their suppliers. While email is far more convenient than phone calls and conventional mail, it’s still a very inefficient and error-prone way to conduct business.

Imagine creating a purchase order as a PDF and sending it to your supplier via email, only to realize that you forgot to attach the actual PO document! Or how about those times when you spend precious minutes hunting for the right invoice or PO through hundreds of emails? Maybe you saved the email attachments to a separate folder on your computer, and you’re not sure which file is the most recent version. Maybe you need to find out how many POs you sent to each of your suppliers this week… When you’re working against the clock to fulfill orders on time, these aren’t the sort of details you should be spending your time on.

Specialized digital solutions for communicating with trading partners and suppliers is much faster and more convenient than email. Instead of preparing a paper document, scanning it, attaching it to an email and sending the email to the right address, you can send the same information from your organization’s ERP system directly to your supplier or partner’s ERP system. This kind of partner integration provides fewer opportunities for manual error, and takes far less time and effort.

Incompatible Partner Standards

Dozens of data formats and data transport protocols exist, so it shouldn’t surprise you to discover that your suppliers use different standards than you do. Some use XML while others use JSON. Some might even use their own proprietary formats.

It isn’t just data formats that differ from partner to partner. Each organization has its own set of business rules that it applies to each type of document the send or receive, or even to specific segments or fields in a document. Fail to comply with these rules and you might be asked to prepare and send those documents again.

Modern partner communication solutions eliminate the complexity caused by mismatched standards by intelligently translating between different standards and keeping track of each vendor’s unique set of business rules. These features are especially useful when you need to onboard a new trading partner quickly.

Scalability

If your company only sends fifteen or twenty business documents a day, email might actually be a workable solution for vendor communication. However, as soon as your business grows and you begin to send fifty to a hundred documents each day, relying on email will cripple your operations. Put simply, email fails to scale.

Modern organizations need to plan ahead and choose communication systems that can support peak transactional workloads, even if their business growth exceeds all expectations. Modern partner communication solutions are designed to process thousands of transactions an hour without any noticeable slowdowns. If your communication infrastructure becomes sluggish under high workloads, your efficiency will suffer, and so will your bottom line.

Each of the pain points mentioned above can wreak havoc on your ability to align inventory with demand and efficiently fulfill orders, and ultimately result in business risk, lower margins, or even loss of business. A scalable supply chain communication solution that integrates with your organization’s ERP platform is a worthwhile investment, and if you don’t have a modern system in place already, now is the time to explore your options. To learn more about ways to improve supply chain reliability, please join our experts on August 1 for an in-depth webinar

Collaboration, Agility, and Visibility: The Supply Chain Trifecta

Customers have become increasingly responsive to new trends and their range of preferences have also diversified, leading to an explosion in the variety of products being sold. High demand for product variety, especially in the case of short lifecycle products like food, apparel, toys, and computers, makes it challenging for manufacturers and retailers to forecast which precise range of products will be a hit with consumers. Extreme competition in the marketplace has forced companies to respond more quickly to customer needs through faster product development and accelerated delivery schedules. Only those companies that offer highly relevant products and deliver them on time receive their customers’ full support and appreciation. Manufacturers and retailers must join forces across the supply chain to become more effective in aligning supply with actual consumer demand.

Improving collaboration, agility, and visibility are the three most important ways to strengthen your supply chain. Each of these three attributes offers multiple operational enhancements for manufacturers and retailers in the fashion, apparel, and consumer goods industries.

Collaboration

Through collaboration, manufacturers and retailers can meet customer demand better by sharing sales information amongst themselves to generate accurate demand forecasts. Sharing information up the supply chain can help companies proactively adjust to evolving supply demands, which leads to less on-hand inventory. Not only is continued collaboration with dedicated partners the best way to reduce long-term supply chain costs, but it also leads to developments in product and process innovation. Instead of relying on telephone conversations or email, leading enterprises use modern communication solutions that seamlessly transfer relevant business information between trading partners’ enterprise systems. Using a specialized business communication solution based on electronic data interchange (EDI) or more modern direct-B2B technology is a great way to ensure secure, reliable, and efficient partner communication.

Agility

High agility enables your business to identify and respond to disruptions to ensure quality customer service. With complete operational integration from manufacturing to delivery, an agile supply chain can adapt to virtually any situation, from vendor reliability issues to unexpected spikes in demand.

Real-time demand data and accurate forecasting make your workflow and production volume more flexible and contribute to greater business output agility. In-depth business intelligence tools can keep track of this information and analysis, and share it with relevant stakeholders across your entire supply chain. More advanced BI tools will notify you if specific performance metrics exceed predefined thresholds that indicate the need for your immediate attention, and cutting-edge solutions use machine learning and heuristics to identify problematic situations, even if they’ve never been encountered before. Techniques like robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent process automation (IPA) can improve agility even further by initiating corrective actions whenever specific events occur. This allows your business to continue operating according to changes in demand, supply, and other market trends, even when human decision makers are not immediately available.

Visibility

Real-time visibility across the entire enterprise is absolutely crucial for informed decision making, order tracking, and inventory management. When new trends emerge in customer or production data, it is important for this information to be in the hands of people that can make value-enhancing business decisions. Organizations with total supply chain visibility don’t measure business through operational silos, with each department or business function operating in isolation. Instead, they take a cross-functional approach that provides an integrated view and allows decision makers to gauge overall performance. Having a fully integrated solution enables the system to seamlessly pull in information from across the enterprise, including production, warehouse, delivery, and sales.

Fully-integrated ERP solutions can help you enhance your organization’s collaboration, agility, and visibility by unifying all supply chain business functions in an easy-to-manage, reliable, and adaptive manner. To learn more about how to leverage digital technology to reduce complexity and improve communication across the supply chain, join supply chain experts at Visionet Systems on July 26 for a webinar on “Improving Supply Chain Reliability with Deeper Vendor Collaboration”.