Send us Fan Mail Getting a visitor to your site is not easy. Once you get visitors, keeping them engaged on the site is not easy either. But what is worse is if they end up dropping out without buying. Dropouts could happen because of a lot of reasons. It could be the higher price or shipping options. It could also be the checkout experience if the process may take a longer time than expected. So how do you control visitors from dropping out? What are the best practices for reducing the dropout?...
Jan 27, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 237
Send us Fan Mail Demand and inventory planning is a dark art that even trained S&OP practitioners struggle to understand. Each company goes through a maturity curve as they scale their operations. They will start with a spreadsheet or a combination of a spreadsheet and an ERP system. They might also do a lot of planning inside the ERP, but the development of those reports could be costly, and your planners may still not like to use it due to the rigidity of the ERP systems. As they grow, the...
Jan 26, 2022•40 min•Ep. 236
Send us Fan Mail Did you know that plastic could be more sustainable than paper? Wait, what? Well, to understand sustainability, you need to analyze the complete product lifecycle, identify your KPIs for the critical material waste, and find out how much total waste you have in the entire product life cycle. If you did this, you might learn that paper usage resulted in wasting some other key resources as the product moved through the supply chain. This is why sustainability is more challenging t...
Jan 25, 2022•49 min•Ep. 235
Send us Fan Mail Prototyping business is unique since each order is different. Most people would not be able to imagine standardization for this business. You may be building parts of different materials, shapes, and sizes and may require different machines and tooling to process the parts. You may also struggle with material storage requirements and might produce several WIP items as it might be cheaper than ordering each individual part. Given such constraints, how many people would think of i...
Jan 24, 2022•44 min•Ep. 234
Send us Fan Mail While most ERP systems might feel as if they overlap entirely, there is a clear distinction between desktop apps, single-tenant, multi-tenant, and enterprise solutions. You might also need to pay attention to how many levels of BOMs are supported in the solution to ensure that you find an appropriate solution for your company. For example, most solutions that support industries such as food and beverage and automotive parts may not be suitable for complex manufacturing such as E...
Jan 22, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 233
Send us Fan Mail While the 3PL and companies involved with freight movement may have much stronger needs for logistics and transportation processes, manufacturers and distributors can't be efficient if they treat logistics as their stepchild. In fact, more and more companies are managing their in-house fleets to meet the consumer expectations of faster delivery and issues such as driver shortages. The inhouse fleets are also required if you have regulated business or special requirements to ship...
Jan 21, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 232
Send us Fan Mail Retaining customers is 10x easier than acquiring them. But you will not be able to create the sticky effect with your customers unless you have a solid strategy behind it. Retention requires a loyalty model that makes your customers feel that they are getting preferential treatment for their loyalty. It also requires you to communicate the value of preferential treatment. Unless you communicate, how would they know that you are doing something for them? Without communication, yo...
Jan 21, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 231
Send us Fan Mail Getting in front of more customers is typically the response of most manufacturers that might have sales performance issues or ambition to grow their sales. But you need a formalized sales process and a deep understanding of why you might be losing your current deals or how to find the next cohort of customers that might be similar to the ones you currently might have to be successful. Also, unless you have a well-adopted CRM for your sales team, it's hard to formalize the sales...
Jan 19, 2022•46 min•Ep. 230
Send us Fan Mail The more regulated a business, the harder the requirements for regulatory compliance. Pharma distribution might feel like a straightforward business, but it has several requirements related to lot and serial number tracking that only exist in this industry. They also have unique channels and how their sales and purchase orders need to be processed in order to be compliant with the regulatory bodies. Utilizing a vanilla ERP for a pharma business may be a harder lift due to the un...
Jan 18, 2022•48 min•Ep. 229
Send us Fan Mail Most manufacturers started their businesses as they were good at making parts. They grew primarily because of word of mouth with very little investment in marketing and automation. They might be sitting on a pile of inventory and legacy machines due to their lack of understanding of how to invest in modern technologies and processes. They might also lose on the opportunities if they might not be able to meet the consumer demand due to the limitations in their capabilities. But w...
Jan 17, 2022•49 min•Ep. 228
Send us Fan Mail Among most software, #ERP systems have always traditionally been the most hated. Each new ERP system that comes to the market seems to claim how they can either expedite the implementation time, increase the adoption, or change the ERP industry. Also, most new systems target smaller niches such as job shops. But the deeper your ERP system is in a specific niche, the less friendly and agile it will be as your business model expands. Specifically, the smaller job shops have a hard...
Jan 15, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 227
Send us Fan Mail A warehouse is a critical component to drive operational efficiency, especially if your company moves a lot of goods. The warehouse is also the area, which is typically the start of the automation, and if you operate your warehouse without barcodes, it might take forever to deliver the goods. Also, with ASRS systems and robots, the sky is the limit with what you could do to treat the warehouse the way it deserves. But without the foundational information architecture and connect...
Jan 14, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 226
Send us Fan Mail Retaining customers is easier and cheaper than acquiring customers. But unless you continuously acquire, you might have growth challenges. You can't simply rely on word-of-mouth channels. Customer acquisition is especially critical for e-commerce. For your customer acquisition to work effectively, you need to master your ideal customer profile and the messaging that will work with them. You also need to master strategies that are going to be uniquely applicable to your customers...
Jan 13, 2022•58 min•Ep. 225
Send us Fan Mail As you grow, you will be getting a lot of offers to get acquired. You might also be acquiring the companies, especially if you might not be able to meet your growth plans through organic channels. Whichever side of the M&A process you might happen to be on, you will only get value from the transaction if it is successfully executed. The most common reasons why acquisitions fail is because of the misunderstanding of the market and focusing solely on the financial models on th...
Jan 12, 2022•40 min•Ep. 224
Send us Fan Mail The social proof is becoming real, especially for B2C and FMCG brands with the advancements in social media and influencer marketing concepts. Also, with the increased competition, it's becoming harder to get placed at shelves in high-traffic areas. Even so, there are several newer technologies out there, such as mass customer mobilization, that can help get visibility for your brand inside the store through non-traditional methods. In today's episode, our guest, Ben Searcy, sha...
Jan 11, 2022•41 min•Ep. 223
Send us Fan Mail What could you do if your business were not able to break through and grow as expected? What would you do if the close rate were extremely low and you couldn't do anything about it as your channel controlled the sales process? While there are several options to help with this issue, including going DTC, the path is extremely risky, especially if you might be taking this path for the first time on such a massive scale. But careful planning and a well-thought-out process beforehan...
Jan 10, 2022•45 min•Ep. 222
Send us Fan Mail Traditional IT required you to stress test programming languages, databases, and server farms based on your expected workload. You designed the system based on the size of your organization. If you are buying an ERP system, you obviously don't have to go through the testing and measurement process as you assume that ERP vendors and salespeople must sell to the right-sized organization. Unfortunately, most ERP salespeople neither have ERP implementation nor an IT background. To b...
Dec 18, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 221
Send us Fan Mail Procurement plays an extremely important role in ensuring that you have the right raw materials at the right place at the right time. They are also responsible for the S&OP planning, which is the hardest to master, and misaligned S&OP functions could significantly impact the top and bottom line. And they are often left behind when it comes to their technology needs. They are also an afterthought in the organization in creating sophisticated procurement processes that wil...
Dec 17, 2021•59 min•Ep. 220
Send us Fan Mail If you are an e-commerce business, you need to have your margins at your fingertips. Understanding your margins for each of your SKUs lets you know if any of the products might be a good fit for marketplaces. They also help you assess if you have enough margin for customs duties on international sales. Finally, they will help you understand if you can offer free shipping, bundle discounts, or cash back options. But sadly, most e-commerce companies very rarely understand their ma...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 219
Send us Fan Mail Most companies are very rarely effective with their pricing strategies. They might have very simplified pricing strategies such as cost-plus to avoid the analyst overhead and lose money by not charging enough. Or they might have very manual processes to monitor competing SKUs at marketplaces or over the web and might lose their margins with the admin overhead. While monitoring pricing has never been straightforward, the newer tools are making the process easier and helping compa...
Dec 15, 2021•45 min•Ep. 218
Send us Fan Mail The automotive industry has always been challenging for manufacturers and distributors serving it. You might have ultra-thin margins with every year the OEMs threatening to reduce the costs further. You also have had traditional demand forecasting issues where the demand forecasted by industry groups may be off by as much as 50%. Also, with COVID and supply chain issues, the job of forecasters has become even more challenging. Now your choice is to overstock or overwork to meet ...
Dec 14, 2021•51 min•Ep. 217
Send us Fan Mail How hard could running a store be? Isn't it as simple as keeping a bunch of products, renting a place, and selling? Also, how hard could it be when you have multiple locations where customers expect consistent experience when they visit any of the stores? Well, if e-commerce is hard, running a retail chain that is known for its customer experience like Starbucks or WholeFoods is equally hard. First, you need to make sure the customers can find the right products at the right pla...
Dec 13, 2021•48 min•Ep. 216
Send us Fan Mail You can't spell Automotive without the mention of Plex. While not as penetrated as other bigger players such as Infor, Epicor, or SAP, Plex has had a significant impact on the ERP community due to the quality of its product. That's probably the reason Rockwell decided to acquire them. But the bigger reason why Rockwell acquired them is because of their MES and IoT capabilities. In fact, if you look closely, Plex would appear more of the MES than ERP. That's also probably why com...
Dec 11, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 215
Send us Fan Mail Even though CFOs and Controllers are responsible for driving the transformation inside the company, they often have to put the needs of their peers in operations, sales, and HR before their own needs. Also, technology decisions are always about trade-offs. If you make the life of customer-facing teams easier, it would mean that your backend teams might need to work harder to meet the expectations. What systems do finance leaders need to drive finance transformation? Is ERP enoug...
Dec 10, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 214
Send us Fan Mail While free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you provide some insights into your funnel and customer behavior, you are simply scratching the surface with the amount of analytics you would need to drive marketing results. With multiple systems being used in the e-commerce architecture, including CRM, website, PIM, and marketplaces, you need a centralized analytics platform to determine which products are the right fit for which channel. Which marke...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 213
Send us Fan Mail If you plan to acquire ISO or AS, one of the critical steps for this journey would be to go through the internal audit process. But who is responsible for internal audits? Is it the external consultants who will be providing the certifications? Is it the quality department? Or is it department heads? While it may seem counter-intuitive, the role of external consultants is not to do the internal audits. The internal auditors are selected from one of the internal teams that is cur...
Dec 08, 2021•41 min•Ep. 212
Send us Fan Mail As you grow, you will go through several stages of S&OP maturity. Sales always conservatively estimate the inventory as they don't want to miss any opportunities. But finance executives want to reduce the inventory as much as possible as that has carrying costs. While you might be aware of the inventory issues, solving them is hard, as they require cross-functional collaboration and agreements across teams. Inventory turnover is one metric that could help you achieve your go...
Dec 07, 2021•41 min•Ep. 211
Send us Fan Mail You might not worry about vendors until one day your production line stops because you didn't realize that you had a single point of failure with your processes. You might also make a strategic choice to simplify your processes by choosing just one vendor for most of your components. But while you might not have issues as of today as you may have had reliable vendors supporting you for a long time, it doesn't mean that you will never face issues because of a single source of sup...
Dec 06, 2021•39 min•Ep. 210
Send us Fan Mail Most large enterprise customers rarely look for an ERP solution outside of SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft as they offer comprehensive global solutions with localizations in most countries. This allows you to use a truly global solution without requiring a country-specific solution for the countries where non-global solutions fall short. When it comes to a truly global solution, some industries have specific supply chain management needs, including global trade management, transporta...
Dec 04, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 209
Send us Fan Mail Building information architecture for e-commerce companies is not easy. Most e-commerce companies serve B2B and B2C, so they need customer-facing websites along with an ERP. But then, with the blurring business models, e-commerce companies, especially those that are DTC, are expected to do a lot more, including managing their complex warehouses and sometimes their fleet for the last-mile delivery if 3PLs may not be as cost-effective or might not be able to meet the lead time req...
Dec 03, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 208
