Send us Fan Mail There is so much talk about marketing automation. But, is marketing automation about automating the entire marketing, so you don't have to hire anyone in the marketing department? Or is it about predicting and creating engagements through content at every step of the way as buyers move through the funnel? How much investment does marketing automation require? Are there any best practices on what to automate and what could be overkill? How important is technology to achieve marke...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 207
Send us Fan Mail While ERP systems have come a long way with their capabilities and faster time-to-value, these investments still take a long time to deliver value to your business, even if you may have gone live within 90 days. Also, you will uncover real issues with the ERP system once you start running your business on the new system due to the lack of interest from most stakeholders during the testing and implementation phase. Finally, the post-implementation phase may cost you more than the...
Dec 01, 2021•44 min•Ep. 206
Send us Fan Mail If you are a warehouse manager, your goal will be to get as many shipments out of the door as fast as possible. You might also be tempted to compare your ratios with other similar warehouses or the warehouses of your competitors. But as each business is different, each warehouse and its ratios will be different as well. So while you need to consider the warehouses and inventory as part of your continuous improvement plan as you learn more about your business and processes, you c...
Nov 30, 2021•39 min•Ep. 205
Send us Fan Mail The larger the organization, the harder it becomes to roll out the implementation and truly reap its benefits. Also, the ERP implementation needs to be treated as a continuous improvement project as the context will change, and as you acquire more data from your ERP implementation, you will have more opportunities to improve your processes. If you don't share your inventory, customer, and vendor data across sites, you will not gain true cost-saving opportunities due to the siloe...
Nov 29, 2021•48 min•Ep. 204
Send us Fan Mail While evaluating ERP systems, one of the critical choices you will have to make is whether to go for ERP systems that are supported directly by the OEM vs. through partners. In the SMB space, most large vendors support their systems through resellers. But some vendors such as IQMS, QAD, and IFS don't have their channels as developed and support their products primarily through their professional services teams. Also, before its acquisition by Dassault systems, IQMS had a very in...
Nov 20, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 203
Send us Fan Mail How would you feel if you noticed the availability of your favorite shirt on a website, but when you walked to the store, it wasn't available there. How would you feel if the coupon provided on purchase from the website would not work on a mobile device because of the disconnected loyalty databases? The channels are increasing at an ever-increasing rate, and with that, the complexity of building omnichannel architecture increases exponentially. Omnichannel experience requires yo...
Nov 19, 2021•57 min•Ep. 202
Send us Fan Mail 48% of customers buy sooner when they have a coupon. And 37% of customers buy more than they normally would. These numbers could be a great tool to drive sales and results. Most people think of coupons as discounts but successfully implementing a good coupon strategy requires far more planning. The coupons require you to identify appropriate distribution channels so they get seen by the customers. The coupon also requires you to identify the right audience and have incentives fo...
Nov 18, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 201
Send us Fan Mail Creating consumer products that don't have a pre-existing category is much harder to sell and commercialize than you would think. You have to figure out how to go through procurement, who will probably not be very receptive to your product as they might get beat up by their management. You may also not have enough funding for advertising campaigns to create the kind of buzz a new product requires. What can you do? You need to think deeper. You have to find non-traditional ways t...
Nov 17, 2021•46 min•Ep. 200
Send us Fan Mail Cannabis has become a booming industry, with several states legalizing the use of cannabis in their states. And the industry is also becoming complex with the ever-increasing applications of Cannabis products and their by-products. The companies need to comply with the state requirements, but there might also be additional process overheads due to federal limitations. While the Cannabis industry has some similarities with other industries such as manufacturing, food, or tobacco,...
Nov 16, 2021•48 min•Ep. 199
Send us Fan Mail Generating demand for new products is super challenging. But the challenges would be at a different level if you had to generate the demand for product categories that didn't exist and if you had to go through procurement. Luckily, today's technologies allow you to target specific roles in a given account, so they can relate with your logo and brand before you visit them. The manufacturers who would have wasted millions of dollars in the generic marketing strategies such as trad...
Nov 15, 2021•46 min•Ep. 198
Send us Fan Mail Open-source is not a term you will hear when it comes to ERP systems. But there are a few open source ERP systems such as Odoo. While their claim of being open-source made them super popular in the development community, are they truly open-source? Well, if you look under the hood, the open-source pitch is really to grab developers' attention as the core component of ERP, such as the accounting module, is not really open source. But developers still love it. That's probably the ...
Nov 13, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 197
Send us Fan Mail When you start your business, you will do whatever you can in your power to survive. You might sign up any customers that might have any amount of money in their pockets. You might sell an offering that you might not have on your menu. Again, we as entrepreneurs have figured out how to survive. But the same entrepreneurial spirit fires back when you are trying to scale your business. Once you reach an inflection point, you will likely have the most complex product mix, manufactu...
Nov 12, 2021•59 min•Ep. 196
Send us Fan Mail While you may get tons of traffic for your e-commerce website, if your users don't find your content interesting, they might not stay on it for very long. And this is where the KPIs around sessions are critical. It will help you understand what's happening after the users land on your pages. It will also help you understand how long they stay on each page and how many pages they visit per session. The session KPIs are helpful when you might have a lot of traffic but not as many ...
Nov 11, 2021•55 min•Ep. 195
Send us Fan Mail Transportation management has multiple facets, and it could mean different things to different companies. But the real value of a TMS system will be when multimode legs are involved in shipping goods. And that's why the transportation and 3PL companies have greater needs for a TMS system than manufacturing and distribution companies. But if the manufacturing company manages its own fleet and requires visibility into multi-mode tracking, it might also need a sophisticated TMS sys...
Nov 10, 2021•36 min•Ep. 194
Send us Fan Mail Logistics planning is hard, and it gets harder as the number of incoming and outgoing truckloads grows for a warehouse or manufacturing facility. While yard management is typically an afterthought as its implications may not impact the core operational and financial transactions, you can't ignore it due to the financial hits caused by unused trailer capacity, detention, and demurrage fee. Unless you have enough data at your fingertips and automated management of your gate etc., ...
Nov 09, 2021•46 min•Ep. 193
Send us Fan Mail The journey of e-commerce could be frightening. In fact, it's kind of confusing because of the blurring line between B2B and B2C. The approach that worked for B2C may not be most appropriate for B2B. There is also a blurring line between whether you want to consider the content-first approach or cart-first. Whatever you consider, you will have significant implications on your business model, and you want to make sure that it's the right fit for your business. If your business is...
Nov 08, 2021•43 min•Ep. 192
Send us Fan Mail Most people might recognize Microsoft for Windows or Office applications. They might also recognize them for their database and Azure. But did you know that Microsoft always had a significant market share in the ERP space? While Microsoft's go-to-market strategy has been very different from other ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP, they have always had a lead in the market with their products such as GP, SL, NAV, and AX. In the world of the Cloud, Microsoft may even be ahead of ...
Nov 06, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 191
Send us Fan Mail Garbage in garbage out is perhaps the most overused phrase of all during the ERP conversations. Everyone uses it, but very few understand the consequences and implications of this phrase. Also, your data, whether structured poorly or diligently, forms the foundation of your business model. But why? Because many data sets are relevant in the ERP conversations, such as master, configuration, transactional, and historical, they each have their implications on the selection and impl...
Nov 05, 2021•58 min•Ep. 190
Send us Fan Mail Pricing and discounting are two strategies to incentivize buyers to make a purchase decision. But there is always confusion where each would be appropriate. Also, pricing is often a sensitive area where most companies would rather undercharge in fear of losing market share or customers. Companies could use pricing strategies such as cost-plus, competition-based, value-based, price skimming, loss-leader, penetration, dynamic, bundle, premium, and anchor. But they rarely understan...
Nov 04, 2021•58 min•Ep. 189
Send us Fan Mail The divide between IT and OT has always been challenging for business executives. But this divide has always existed and still exists among other groups too. For example, sales and marketing teams don't like to deal with IT as they are perceived to slow down things. The supply chain doesn't like them either as they would rather manage their systems independently than dealing with IT. While other groups have realized the importance of IT and created true partnerships, OT teams ha...
Nov 03, 2021•41 min•Ep. 188
Send us Fan Mail Due to the proliferation of IoT devices in manufacturing environments, the number of access points prone to attack has increased significantly. And while the OT environments don't have as thicker the code base as the IT environment, OT environments are less secure than IT. The lack of education in how to write production-ready software and a greater push for efficiency have been the reasons why OT devices are more prone to attack with higher safety consequences. In today's episo...
Nov 02, 2021•48 min•Ep. 187
Send us Fan Mail Scheduling has always been challenging for manufacturing industries, especially for industries such as Automotive, where stopping the assembly line even for a couple of hours could mean the loss of millions of dollars for a company. Some industries also have challenges where the skill matrix could play a huge role in your scheduling as the skills may not be transferrable. If you don't have a sense of how many associates from each skill would show up on the shop floor and if ther...
Nov 01, 2021•39 min•Ep. 186
Send us Fan Mail Epicor is the household name for mid-market manufacturing and distribution companies. Just like Infor, it offers last-mile functionality for manufacturing and distribution companies that may not be available through other enterprise players such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. While Epicor may not be as global a solution as some of their larger competitors, they offer more value to the SMB manufacturers and distributors. Epicor also has a similar strategy as Infor and Aptean to f...
Oct 30, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 185
Send us Fan Mail The supply chain structure defined in the ERP software must mirror the actual supply chain. But it very rarely does. This issue is even more critical when the organizations may have multiple sites to distribute or manufacture goods. The supply chain professionals often need to plan on spreadsheets to make up for the underlying problems in the ERP configurations and data. While there are many definitions of a multi-site implementation, the sites in most implementations maintain t...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 184
Send us Fan Mail Planning for sales in the traditional world was easy. If you had a retail location, you would plan the right location, inventory, study the neighborhood, and provide the customer service and pricing aligned with the neighborhood's needs. If you were selling through big-box retailers or distributors, you had to hire salespeople qualified to sell to distributors, design their territories, and perhaps send them to golf courses. In the world of e-commerce, planning for sales require...
Oct 28, 2021•58 min•Ep. 183
Send us Fan Mail Identifying the appropriate production method requires you to have a deep understanding of your finished products and raw materials consumed. An incorrect production method and its KPIs may have implications on the production capacity. Also, if there is a mismatch in your demand and supply, you might need to understand if there might be a way to increase the capacity. If you are lucky, you might be able to duplicate the existing line and increase it. But if you have to install a...
Oct 27, 2021•40 min•Ep. 182
Send us Fan Mail Traditionally most systems used on the shop floor were disconnected. Even if you had multiple systems such as ERP and MES, they didn't have real-time connectivity with the machines. And to get data from these systems, manufacturers created data lakes and powered dashboards using the insights gathered from these lakes. While these dashboards provide visibility into operations to some degree, they were deficient in providing the controls that connected systems would offer. With th...
Oct 26, 2021•35 min•Ep. 181
Send us Fan Mail Edge computing is powerful. It can help companies monitor and maintain distributed assets that would otherwise require significant capital and manpower to manage. In addition, these technologies allow your technicians to control those devices remotely without having to travel. You can also gather tons of insights that can improve the operational performance of these devices and help them recover for common error conditions. However, due to the Cyber Security issues and data cent...
Oct 25, 2021•39 min•Ep. 180
Send us Fan Mail Oracle and SAP are the only two names you will hear in the enterprise accounts while everyone else is trying to claim the third spot, including Microsoft, Infor, and Sage. In fact, you might hear that you are either an SAP shop or an oracle shop in the enterprise community. Oracle also largely dominates the database market, which could be why IT typically champions Oracle applications inside enterprise accounts. But in the cloud market, that's no longer true as now Oracle has tw...
Oct 23, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 179
Send us Fan Mail Utilizing software in a siloed department is super easy. But as your enterprise grows, you will require cross-functional collaboration across departments. You will have systems that share common data, such as inventory or parts, customers, and vendors. Your architecture may contain ERP, E-commerce, WMS, MES, and P2P systems. Each of them is equally important, which may be dictated by the needs of each department. If you don't have a clearly defined source of authority for each m...
Oct 22, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 178
