Send us Fan Mail The audit procedures require end-to-end traceability and visibility into your processes. While they might vary a bit across industries such as medical or aerospace, the fundamentals are still the same. They are the same in how you vet your suppliers, how you ensure that the due dates are accurate on your POs, and finally, how you deliver to your customers with consistency. So how do you ensure that you are not going to get any red flags during the audit process? In today's episo...
Apr 18, 2022•47 min•Ep. 297
Send us Fan Mail What is one thing do you know about Salesforce fans? Well, for one, they absolutely love the salesforce platform. Me included! The love is so intense that they will do anything and everything to remain on Salesforce. And why not? There is not a single CRM platform that comes close to matching the depth and object hierarchy while not being as limiting as the ERP systems? But how would you feel about running your entire business on Salesforce? Nice idea, right? Irrespective of whe...
Apr 15, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 296
Send us Fan Mail How much of an impact might UoM conversions have on an ERP implementation? Well, if you asked a seasoned guy who has been part of a large implementation, UoM conversions fire back pretty bad. In fact, at times, they could be a make or break for the ERP implementations. The UoM conversions not supported the way your business processes are structured could be the birth of ad-hoc and excel-based processes. So what are the pitfalls when it comes to UoMs? How to find the UoMs that wi...
Apr 14, 2022•49 min•Ep. 295
Send us Fan Mail Most businesses struggle with providing consistent pricing across channels. Even when we think of static pricing, the systems and departments are not connected in how they price the product. The accounting may set the cost standards. But sales and marketing might maintain the pricing completely separately in a siloed manner in eComm. The inconsistent pricing experience can come across as alarming for customers. If you charge too high, then you will be missing opportunities. If y...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 294
Send us Fan Mail BOMs inside ERP systems are not designed to track specification data. If you have several variables associated with your BOMs, then you might need to track specifications separately. Even if you have PIM or PLM, you might still need the specification software as that can not only help in creating the product model faster, but it can centralize your specification data, especially if you might be using multiple systems in your architecture. The centralized specifications could als...
Apr 12, 2022•47 min•Ep. 293
Send us Fan Mail If your physical and digital inventory may not be aligned and you don't have KPIs to track your excess inventory and obsolescence, you might be carrying aging inventory, and you might not be aware of that. Also, while some of the inventory may appear aging, if that is the critical inventory for their machines or operations, there may be a chance that you may not have these parts when you need them the most. Planning for inventory excess and obsolescence is hard as you not only n...
Apr 11, 2022•51 min•Ep. 292
Send us Fan Mail The developer community often thinks that the problem associated with ERP complexity or costs is technical. Time after time, we have seen developers championing how concepts such as no-code or open source can solve problems of the ERP world. The problems associated with ERP failures are very rarely technical or product-related. The hardest problem in the ERP world is getting everyone in one room to discuss or agree on a decision. Now, if you might take a couple of days to make a...
Apr 08, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 291
Send us Fan Mail Unit economics is critically important for product-centric businesses. If you don't understand your true cost, you might be selling at a much higher price, which would mean that you might not be able to win against your competitors. Also, if you are selling at a lower price as you may be missing on some cost elements, you might be losing money or selling unprofitable products. Product costing has deeper implications on your finance, supply chain, and operations. It could especia...
Apr 07, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 290
Send us Fan Mail Most companies might start selling on the website without going through the structured thinking of enabling user experience and mapping customer journeys. They may also start coding without going through the design process and wireframing the ideas. Wireframing plays a vital communication tool to align the expectations and test if the design is aligned with the user's expectations. But how to start on the journey of wireframing? What do you need to have before starting on this j...
Apr 06, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 289
Send us Fan Mail If you asked most salespeople about whether their software can integrate, their standard answer would be that they have APIs. Well, APIs allow you to retrieve data from systems in a structured fashion and remove the technical boilerplate of that system. You still need to design your integration flows around your business requirements. APIs are NOT meant to have self-integration capabilities. This is especially true for integration between your eCommerce and ERP systems, as that ...
Apr 05, 2022•47 min•Ep. 288
Send us Fan Mail The cultural factors drive how users will perceive an ERP or WMS product as each geography may have different ways of processing transactions. They might also be using terms and keywords that they might not be able to relate with in a system that might be built for completely different geography. But the cultural factors are not only limited to just the terms and keywords. Sometimes what profit may mean in a developed country may be completely different in the developing country...
Apr 04, 2022•47 min•Ep. 287
Send us Fan Mail Growing through acquisition is not a new strategy. Infor started it. And now several companies are following, especially the PE-owned ones such as ECi and Aptean. PE companies pursue this strategy in the hope of gaining quick market share through edge products or specialized products purpose-built for specific industries. Most of these products are typically built by companies that were cash-starved, and they had to cut corners to survive and sell at a lower price than their big...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 286
Send us Fan Mail Cannabis is a beast when it comes to its process complexity. Also, the ever-changing regulatory compliance and reporting increase the challenges. The critical process of cannabis is seed-to-sale that starts with the grower facility, where every plant needs to be tracked. Then, as cannabis moves through the processing stages where even multiple companies could be involved, such as growers and extraction facilities, the reporting requirements are still the same, with tight yield a...
Mar 31, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 285
Send us Fan Mail How many people here like to receive promotions in SMS? Not many, right? And yet Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of customer service organizations will be using SMS and messaging rather than native apps. SMS could be used for promo, remarketing, order confirmations, and dispatch notifications. SMS is also not as intrusive as other forms of communication such as email and phone. In addition, SMS forces you to limit your message and get your message across in fewer characters. ...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 284
Send us Fan Mail Industry4.0 could mean a lot of things to different people. While the idea of Industry4.0 is compelling, it requires a lot of moving pieces from identifying appropriate processes for data collection and then having monitoring and alerting infrastructure in place so that the maintenance can take action before it's too late and expensive. Condition monitoring is one area that plays a very important role with processes, especially if you have several manual interventions in the pro...
Mar 29, 2022•43 min•Ep. 283
Send us Fan Mail Amazon has become so big that it has its own constitution and regularly publishes legislation with clear guidelines for vendors and suppliers. While Amazon recognizes the importance of the Vendor ecosystem, they have always been customer-focused. Also, if your business is not diversified, the business buyers might perceive you as a risk as they don't like to see your business to be completely concentrated on a few customers or channels. But, even for Amazon-centric businesses, y...
Mar 28, 2022•46 min•Ep. 282
Send us Fan Mail What's an ERP and what's not an ERP will always be the classic debate in the ERP community. Surprisingly enough, even the largest of the largest companies missed their understanding of the secret sauce for Salesforce. They had always felt that CRM was just a module of ERP. And how much damage could a CRM company cause? Well, Salesforce is no longer just a threat. They have created a completely new category and expanded the market further than any ERP company would ever imagine. ...
Mar 25, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 281
Send us Fan Mail Agriculture and F&B industries are unique beasts when it comes to their ERP needs. They have unique traceability requirements that you might not find with most companies. They also have unique formulation, and their product management processes are fairly involved. One process that is unique with these industries is the field-to-fork process, where the traceability and farm accounting requirements might throw your ERP implementation off if you have not selected the right too...
Mar 24, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 280
Send us Fan Mail Life would be easy if we had to sell only to one ideal customer profile and buyer persona. Most companies sell to multiple ideal customer profiles. That makes the job of a marketer much harder. These profiles could vary based on industries, roles, product groups, etc. But what is so hard about managing multiple customer profiles? Well, each customer profile has its needs in terms of what they like about their buying preferences and the messaging that will resonate with them the ...
Mar 23, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 279
Send us Fan Mail Sheet metal industry produces one of the most foundational products that we need as consumers and in our industrial applications. This industry also requires significant efficiency with operations and raw materials due to cost pressures and ultra-low margins. The recent supply challenges and labor shortages are driving the demand for even more efficiency in how they consume energy, process raw materials, run their operations, and manage their supply chain. The traditional lean m...
Mar 22, 2022•40 min•Ep. 278
Send us Fan Mail The challenge with the technology world is that new technologies keep popping up on a daily basis with significant overlap and with no clarity on where and how they will fit in the architecture and what their scope will be as they interact with other systems and cross-functional processes. There is also typically a misunderstanding of a data and analytics system vs. a system that is designed to automate and integrate operational workflows and allow teams to collaborate on a sing...
Mar 21, 2022•46 min•Ep. 277
Send us Fan Mail In the ERP community, there is always a debate about what an ERP is. Sure, you could say that anything that automates enterprise and cross-functional workflow could qualify as an ERP. This would include solutions such as CRM, HCM, MES, P2P, and the real ERP, as they all automate enterprise workflows to some degree. Also, there is a thin line as the companies that grew as edge apps like Salesforce, Workday, or ServiceNow tries to gain additional capabilities in other functions in...
Mar 18, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 276
Send us Fan Mail When it comes to ERP implementations or digital transformation for asset-heavy organizations, asset management is perhaps the most complex area and one of the hardest to implement. The assets could be internal or external for one of your customers. The external assets follow a very different lifecycle with several stakeholders involved with how they are managed, leased, and serviced. The internal assets are equally trickier to manage with the cross-functional collaboration requi...
Mar 17, 2022•59 min•Ep. 275
Send us Fan Mail Email has always been the most predictable channel to drive your customers back to the funnel for eCommerce or digital-savvy companies. Email keeps them engaged and provides opportunities for them to get the best out of their investments and the additional purchases they might be able to make through cross-sell and upsell. Also, with the advancements in Artificial intelligence and recommendation technologies, the new tools are able to recommend exciting workflows that may not ha...
Mar 16, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 274
Send us Fan Mail What comes to mind when you think of loyalty erosion? Do you currently have a formal loyalty plan, measurement, or metrics in place? Well, most SMB companies don't even understand how to take advantage of customer-experience-driven innovations. The customer experience is certainly an untapped area for most organizations and where bigger companies have a true edge. But how do you start on the journey of customer experience and how to ensure that your customer experience initiativ...
Mar 15, 2022•46 min•Ep. 273
Send us Fan Mail Finance always takes the back seat in organizations over sales and operational priorities. But without setting clear financial goals and plans to execute them, it's like shooting in the dark. Sure, you may have gotten lucky to grow at the desired pace. But how confident would you be to sustain that growth? Not much, right? This is where the connected systems and financial KPIs can provide the framework for growth with confidence. In today's episode, our guest, Jim Downes, shares...
Mar 14, 2022•42 min•Ep. 272
Send us Fan Mail ERP industry is divided mainly into two flavors. One is primarily focused on product-centric industries such as manufacturing, distribution, and retail. The other focuses on service-centric industries such as not-for-profit, architecture and engineering firms, construction, public sector, education, etc. But if you are in the construction or govt contracting space, your needs are likely to be unique. First, you have the compliance needs for unions with their requirements for sub...
Mar 11, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 271
Send us Fan Mail Record-to-report business processes typically take the back seat with ERP implementation projects as O2C, and P2P get the most limelight due to the customer-facing nature of these processes. Also, the decision made to streamline O2C and P2P processes and improve the cycle time for these transactions will have implications on the record-to-report processes. As you grow, your finance department is likely to grow as well. And if you can not streamline, your SG&A will likely to ...
Mar 10, 2022•59 min•Ep. 270
Send us Fan Mail While you might feel how critical the testing could be in a software project? Well, that's the foundation of success whether the software will work or be usable in production. Also, there are differences in how eCommerce implementation projects need to be tested vs. the eCommerce development. In the case of the implementation projects, you might not have the users that may have a deep software development background and might not understand the importance of testing or how to wr...
Mar 09, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 269
Send us Fan Mail Everyone has their preferences of how they shop and search. This makes the job of eCommerce companies harder as they can only do so much to understand customer preferences and align them with their product catalog. But if you streamlined your guided navigation and personalization, it could also be a competitive advantage for companies. The more personalized experience you could provide to your customers, the higher their affinity with your brand. In today's episode, our guest, B...
Mar 08, 2022•45 min•Ep. 268
