Author: RV_Author

Introduction to ERP Landscape

In the complex world of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, businesses often face a critical decision: should they opt for a general ERP solution and customize it to fit their specific needs, or should they choose a vertical ERP that is tailored for their industry right out of the box? While general ERP systems offer broad capabilities, the modern business environment—with its emphasis on efficiency and specialization—increasingly favours vertical ERP solutions, especially in specialist industries like retail.

Customization Costs and Complexity            

General ERP systems are designed to be highly flexible, capable of serving a wide range of industries with extensive customization. However, this flexibility often comes with prohibitive costs and complexities. It is common for the customization costs of a general ERP to equal or even exceed the initial licensing fees. These projects can require considerable time investments and substantial financial resources, with ongoing expenditures for consulting fees to maintain and update custom features. This approach can strain a company’s resources and extend the time to value, potentially hindering a business’s agility and responsiveness.

Advantages of Vertical ERP Systems

Vertical ERP systems, by contrast, are developed with a deep understanding of industry-specific workflows, compliance requirements, and business processes. These systems are pre-configured to meet the unique needs of specific industries, such as retail, manufacturing, or healthcare. For retailers, a vertical ERP can provide specialized functionalities such as merchandising management, inventory forecasting, omnichannel sales integration, and customer loyalty programs. These features are built into the platform, significantly reducing the need for expensive and time-consuming customizations.

Cost and Time Efficiency

The specialized nature of vertical ERPs translates into direct cost savings. Since these systems require less customization, the associated costs—both in terms of money and time—are markedly reduced. Businesses can deploy vertical ERP solutions much faster than generalized systems, enabling quicker training for staff and faster realization of benefits. This swift deployment allows companies to focus on using the ERP to drive business value, rather than getting bogged down by the implementation process.

Strategic Fit and Industry Expertise

Vertical ERPs offer more than just specialized functionalities; they also bring industry expertise embedded within their design. Providers of vertical ERP solutions often have experience in the industries they serve, allowing them to anticipate the needs and challenges specific to those sectors. This results in a system that not only fits the industry better but also evolves according to industry standards and changes. For retail businesses, this means having a system that is consistently aligned with consumer trends, supply chain innovations, and evolving market dynamics.

Conclusion: Making the Wise Choice

In conclusion, while general ERPs offer versatility, the specialization, cost efficiency, and strategic alignment provided by vertical ERP systems make them a compelling choice for industries that have specific and nuanced needs. Retail businesses stand to benefit from vertical ERPs that can seamlessly integrate every aspect of retail operations. By choosing a vertical ERP, retailers can minimize reliance on costly consultants, reduce the risk of project overruns, and ensure that their ERP system enhances, rather than hinders, their business operations. In the fast-paced retail sector, where adapting to market trends quickly is crucial, a vertical ERP offers a clear path to achieving competitive advantage and operational excellence. All our Retail ViVA clients across the continents echo the same thoughts as above consistently to us.

In the dynamic world of retail, staying ahead of the curve requires embracing innovation and speed. With the advancement of the campaign module in www.retailviva.com, retailers now have access to a powerful tool that streamlines the process of posting retail promotions across social media platforms. This feature empowers retail clients to effortlessly upload promotion collateral and select the desired social media channels, eliminating the time-consuming task of individual posting.

Efficiency Amplified: Retail ViVA’s campaign module revolutionizes social media posting by consolidating all posting tasks into a single interface. Gone are the days of navigating through multiple platforms to publish promotions. With Retail ViVA, retailers can now manage their entire campaign from one screen and with just one click, saving valuable time and resources. For example, a clothing retailer can seamlessly promote their latest collection across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X(Twitter) simultaneously, maximizing exposure and engagement.

Streamlined Workflow: By bringing all posting tasks into one centralized platform, Retail ViVA simplifies the workflow of social media posting for retailers. This not only enhances efficiency but also improves organizational productivity. With the ability to schedule posts for specific timings, retailers can ensure their promotions reach their target audience during peak viewing hours, maximizing impact and visibility. For instance, a coffee shop can schedule posts for their morning specials to greet customers at the right moment when they are planning their day.

Flexibility and Convenience: The scheduling feature offered by Retail ViVA’s campaign module provides retailers with the flexibility to manage their social media presence without being tied to their screens. Whether it’s after hours, weekends, or holidays, retailers can schedule posts in advance, ensuring a consistent and timely presence on social media platforms. This flexibility not only simplifies the posting process but also allows retailers to focus on other aspects of their business. For example, surprise discount offers can be prescheduled to create interests in in-store customers during peak hours and entire others to walk-in to enjoy valuable discounts.

Customer Centricity: Retail ViVA’s campaign module stands out as a testament to our commitment to customer-centric innovation. By understanding the challenges faced by modern retailers, we have developed a solution that not only enhances efficiency but also empowers retailers to adapt to the demands of the digital age. With Retail ViVA, retailers can embrace efficient processes like campaign automation to reduce human labour for routine tasks, allowing them to focus on what truly matters – delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving business growth.

Retail businesses often use special promotions to build their brand identity. When successful, these promotional campaigns can popularize the retail brand, leading to increased recognition and sales. Here, we share how businesses can use these promotions to enhance brand identity and recognition.   
1. Understand message and identity:

Before launching promotions, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of the overall identity and goals of the business. This involves identifying what sets the business apart and the primary message the business aims to convey. The answers to these questions can help create effective promotional strategies.

In today’s digital age, managing a business’s message online is as crucial as its offline counterpart. Therefore, companies must ensure that their online messaging and promotions align with their offline initiatives. Whether it’s the business’s website, social media, or emails, maintaining consistent design elements and business messaging across all platforms is paramount.

2. Identify target audience:

Every promotion must have a specific target audience. To come up with effective retail promotions, the business must first understand the preferences and needs of this target demographic. This understanding makes it easier to tailor promotional campaigns that meet the requirements and expectations of the target audience.

3. Offer value:

Promotions should provide genuine value to consumers, rather than merely serving as a marketing tactic to improve brand identity. Whether it is a discount or exclusive offers, each promotion should benefit consumers in reality.

4. Leverage seasonal and trendy themes:

Retail businesses need to stay relevant and competitive at all times. This is true even when developing promotions. Businesses have to leverage current themes, seasons, or festivals when designing special promotions. Doing so also ensures that each promotion actually serves a purpose to consumers.

5. Exclusivity and limited-time offers:

Every promotion must create a sense of urgency for consumers. This can be achieved easily by developing promotions that are exclusive and have a predetermined deadline. Limited-period discounts or offers increase the sense of anticipation in buyers. At the same time, such promotional campaigns enhance brand recognition since consumers are forced to remember the business name as a source of profitable deals.

6. Reward loyalty:

Loyalty programs are special schemes within promotions that reward regular consumers of a business. This not only ensures that customers keep coming back, but also establishes a good reputation for the business. The retail business with good loyalty programs enjoys an image of a company that values its consumers. Consumers can advocate for a business when they feel like valued members of a community, which further improves recognition.

7. Feedback and improvement:

Promotions also present the opportunity to gather feedback from consumers regarding their retail experience. Based on their feedback, a business can keep working to improve certain aspects and develop better promotions in the future.

8. Measure and analyze:

After a promotion ends, businesses can analyze the results and derive useful data. They can measure various key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess whether the promotional campaign was successful regarding different factors, such as sales, visibility, and more. If not, businesses can use the data to refine their promotions in the future.

Looking for an effective retail erp system to manage your retail business?

Explore the Retail ViVA ERP systems. We have built a platform that unifies 26-distinct modules of the retail business, right from procuring to warehousing. One of these modules, namely Campaign, can also assist in planning and executing promotions. The ERP for the retail industry has simplified making data-driven decisions for our clients by bringing together different aspects of their business in one unified platform. 

Inventory precision is a crucial performance matrix for every retail enterprise in the world. Inventory stock-outs is an opportunity lost to sell to a prospective customer, be it an existing customer or acquisition of a new customer.  Retailers experience around 30% stock-outs to customer needs. Unless a customer need is instantly satisfied as demanded, retaining the loyalty of a customer becomes an uphill task. In today’s digital world, it takes minutes for a customer to switch allegiance and become habituated to another new experience, forgetting earlier brand experience. Retailers need to ensure stocks are available in the right quantities, smartly moving inventory at the right time.

Various decision support systems surrounding inventory movements across stores and warehouses can determine optimum stock movements between warehouses and stores, to ensure stock-outs are minimum or almost negligible.

Retailers need to get real-time visibility of their inventory as shoppers do transactions across multi-channels and replenish stocks depending on movements.  Most retailers have thousands of stock-keeping units (SKU), and hence continuous monitoring becomes a daunting task. Merchandising module in retail ERP software precisely does this function of allocating inventory transfer depending on the movement of stock at stores and based on classification of fast, normal, slow, or non-moving. That’s precisely the reason that our Retail ERP has got an advanced merchandising module that auto-suggests or triggers stock transfers between warehouses and stores or between stores in a proactive manner. Since most retailers operate on batch-integrated point of sales (POS) system, they do not get minute-to-minute inventory status, which then pushes stock transfers to the next day, after end-of-day (EOD) processing is complete. Our Retail ViVA ERP POS is online and updates stocks in real-time across all channels so that one can see stocks online and take quick actions towards replenishment. A matured merchandising module is key to avoiding stock-outs of out-of-stock (OOS) situations

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Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

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Many of our legacy retailers are exploring change to being digital and omnichannel with objective of providing unique experiences to their customers.  Any transformation of this nature can’t be accomplished unless the enterprise has got its basics in place.  The core enterprise resource planning modules must be in full stabilised shape with an integrated commerce solution as starting point. 

Blending of traditional business process with new age digital experience process requires careful planning and orchestration.  The change management needs to be handled in a positive and proactive manner.  The concept of intelligently joining the business as usual with newly sought-after channels with matching experiences needs to be supported by an agile ERP technology that can transform traditional business process quickly and on the fly.  Most legacy retailers suffer due to their current ERP being incapable of matching other channel’s modern experience base.

When customer becomes the centre point, all legacy processes must stand to change to meet customer expectations.  Today’s customer loves to engage and transact with multiple devices, sometime physical, sometimes digital and sometimes in combination.  The young, affluent and digitally savvy customers are inquisitive about using the right channel that suits them at that moment.  They switch their choices according to their convenience and the difficult promise to provide the same experience to customers merits detailed attention

Most retail ERP products do not cover all business functions, forcing retailers to choose multiple software and spend time and energy on integration to have omnichannel setup. This also enlarges the time a traditional retailer’s desire to project themselves beyond their store to the customer.  With agile ERP, the technology layer can be quite easier to adapt to creating newer experience in traditional channel as well.  That’s why we built most modules of our retail ERP, Retail ViVA, in no-code platform, providing that agility to enterprises to change their traditional business model quickly to match to modern channels design.

After all, Retail is no more about customer satisfaction, it is about consistent customer experiences and omnichannel is no more a top floor offering, it is just a shop floor offering.

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Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

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Stock-take is a process where the physical count of items in any shop or warehouse is matched with its system stock quantity. There is quite often differences between them due to reasons attributable to a) wrong barcoding; b) pilferage; c) breakage etc.,

Most retailers are unable to perform stock-take during operating hours due to the use of an off-line POS system, which updates stock of inward and outward once in the night. Hence, at the time of stock-take, the system quantity is not live and real and hence can’t be matched instantly. Further, due to time lag between count and system stock updating, a lengthy reconciliation process is attempted before a stock-take result is finally closed and count variances are posted to inventory and financial general ledger. Given this lethargic process, often stock take is delayed or neglected, leading to poor inventory control and management

Statistics indicate a 30% difference between physical and system stock in a retail environment, leading to poor customer satisfaction. Further, every stock-take count takes about two weeks to close after prolonged backward reconciliation process

Intelligent stock take is a process where you use barcode equipped mobile phones to scan items and instantly match with system stock. Intelligent stock take can be performed at any point in time, including during operating hours of a store.

Stock-take variances are reconciled instantly, and variances analyzed at the close of every stock-take count and disposed of with count adjustments or otherwise. Since it is online and real-time, intelligent stock take helps to identify actual stock items where there are variances, thereby reducing variance analysis time substantially. There is no need to do backward reconciliations and waste precious man-hours

Of our experience with clients using our Retail ViVA ERP, Intelligent stock take improves efficiency over 300% while reducing cycle time by about 90%, compared to traditional stock-take methods

Intelligent stock-take also helps to do risk analysis of items that are perpetually indifference and thus provides inputs for system and control improvisation

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Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

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Responsiveness is an organization’s ability to recognize and be ready to adapt to changes almost instantly as industry and customer preferences change. If the company can’t be responsive, it will never be able to meet constantly changing customer expectations

The centricity of success has changed from machines and logistics in 20th century to software and enterprise systems in the 21st Century, which means that enterprise systems are directly and continuously and instantly shaped by what the market wants. An enterprise that can make its enterprise systems change flexibly almost co-terminus to market change is a successful 21st-century enterprise (21CE).

Unless 21CE’s reinvent their process and business models constantly, their survival becomes difficult. It is just new normal that 21CE constantly reconfigure their resources and capabilities. Since 21CE are highly digital and offers complete digital experiences to customers, any reconfigurations invariably lead to their enterprise systems change. That’s the flexibility 21CE is looking for, to have flexible enterprise systems. However intelligent a 21CE enterprise is, if it is not responsive, its intelligence can’t be exploited.  Every 21CE will be digitized and effectively become a software company or majorly driven by software algorithms, data, and analytics.

Enterprise systems to be considered flexible must allow for new functionality to be introduced easily and quickly. The biggest challenge of enterprise systems today is their scalability for new changes in a quick and self-service manner. The dependence on multi-party service providers makes companies wait for change and thus lose critical timeframes. Prolonged interactions with service providers frustrate internal stakeholders without being able to see the change instantly.  Internal stakeholders in any enterprise expect systems that respond to their information capture and analytic needs in a manner that is the most natural or self-service manner to them.

Companies who develop this responsiveness will successfully navigate change and maintain their customer relationships and provide that unified customer experience to delight.

Then what kind of enterprise systems do 21CE adopt? They must be flexible which means it is self-configurable and fully on self-service basis. And to respond to change quickly and to re-configure business models, it must be driven by change at their end rather than waiting for an external service provider to make the change slowly. A low-code/no-code is the best choice any responsive enterprise must make which then gives them the agility to be dynamic and adapt to change instantly.

That’s precisely the reason that Sathguru built sixteen of its twenty-six modules bundled retail ERP, Retail ViVA through its own no-code platform, to provide that flexibility to customers for making change on their own.

21CE are responsive enterprises that demand self-service creations and what more than no-code be the answer to it!

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Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

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