Companies are investing time and money to improve their bottom line; yesterday, today and tomorrow? Most industries have similar value chains which include your Company, its Suppliers, and Customers. Increasing actual responsiveness lies in integrating underlying business applications to streamline e.g. Supply Chain companies; e-commerce, warehouse and shipping processes. Information flows seamless and everyone sees same data updated in real time.
Poor Integration Leaves Gaps in Automation
while companies are investing heavily in applications to support e-commerce, cloud-based ERP and mobility, these applications are not, however, tightly integrated and they often lack all of the features necessary to fully automate order management and fulfilment processes, especially across new fulfillment models. This often leads to pockets of manual work or gaps in automation, which creates labor-intensive clerical tasks, error-prone data entry and compromised customer service.
For example, it's typically a manual process to re-enter orders captured by e-commerce applications such as BigCommerce, Shopify and Magento into ERP solutions such as NetSuite, QuickBooks or Acumatica. Similarly, in the warehouse, purchase order receiving and picking processes are often paper-based, which are inherently inefficient and inaccurate. The challenge in filling these types of gaps exists for small businesses and Fortune 500 companies alike. While small- to medium-sized companies often lack the IT resources or expertise, the huge IT departments at larger companies are often consumed by bigger projects.
The E-Commerce-to-ERP Divide
Many retailers are feeling the strain of disparate manual processes. When they launch their new e-commerce strategy and deploy e.g. Magento website to sell directly to consumers. When online sales began to grow rapidly, the lack of integration between Magento and QuickBooks becomes problematic.
It created administrative bottlenecks as orders had to be typed into QuickBooks and, when shipped, status and tracking information needed to be manually entered into Magento. Another issue is ensuring the integrity of addresses. When traditional wholesalers open up e-commerce channels, they start shipping orders in the thousands to consumers versus the smaller number of repeat orders for dealers. For these retailers, integrating its e-commerce app into the order fulfillment process and validating addresses prior to streaming them into QuickBooks resulted in powerful new capabilities.
Omnichannel Shakes up the Warehouse
For companies who take on an e-commerce strategy, supporting multiple fulfilment channels also has a huge impact on the warehouse. In other cases, companies "born" into e-commerce (i.e., sell only online since inception) find they need to expand fulfillment models as they attract attention from and become suppliers to large retailers. Take an example of leading fan Engagement Company in the sports consumer marketplace; Targeting youth, fan and collector markets with both physical and digital products; they have achieved tremendous growth selling both online to consumers and to specialty stores. This required, however, two different pick models in the warehouse to drive efficiency as consumer orders are high volume compared to lower volume specialty store orders.
For consumer orders, the company integrated warehouse and inventory operations with its Acumatica Cloud ERP Platform to create a batch process where pack slips were all printed with shipping labels on 8.5×11" sheets. This allowed this retailer to efficiently pick multiple orders with one pass through the warehouse and pre-label for shipping. For specialty orders, it remained more efficient to pick orders one at a time.
More recently, ongoing growth has seen this company add large retailers who require EDI, and also have orders with hundreds of lines where picking takes hours or even spans days. This workflow was also automated through integration. Shipping rules and profiles were also adapted to streamline fulfillment as EDI orders required Advanced Shipment Notification (ASN) information, printing UCC 128 labels, and a mix of small package and freight shipment.
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