Send us Fan Mail Epicor Prophet 21 has always been extremely popular among industrial distributors. But is Epicor P21 fit for all businesses? Can it work for manufacturing as well as distribution? How about businesses that might manufacture as well as distribute? How is it different from other Epicor products such as Kinetic and Eclipse? Has it been upgraded to the cloud version? How cloud-native would it be? Would there be any limitations, such as the inability to open multiple windows or enter...
Jul 12, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 348
Send us Fan Mail The furniture industry is extremely unique as while its distribution processes might be similar to other distribution industries, each product is custom-made. And this makes implementing eCommerce for furniture manufacturers extremely challenging. The manufacturers also need to make sure that there is no channel conflict. And their retailers are comfortable with their intention of going DTC and eCommerce. If communicated properly, the eCommerce efforts not only help in getting m...
Jul 11, 2022•47 min•Ep. 347
Send us Fan Mail The rising consumer expectations and growing trend of marketplaces are driving the order processing complexity for businesses. Sales order processing is increasingly complex. You have challenges such as partial delivery. In some industries, the entire order-to-cash cycle needs to be closed for a line before the other line can be processed. There might also be other trends, such as shipping early in the hope of getting higher margins from the order. So, what architectural conside...
Jul 07, 2022•59 min•Ep. 346
Send us Fan Mail A2X is not the name you might recognize unless you are in the Xero or Shopify ecosystem. But they have created a new category of software, which seems exciting for eCommerce merchants, especially due to the amount of additional overhead you add with each marketplace you sell on. Each marketplace and big-box retailer are trying to come up with its own business models. And sometimes, that could require as much admin effort as you would get in managing a physical store. The admin e...
Jul 06, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 345
Send us Fan Mail Infor LN has been the household name for many Automotive and Aerospace companies. If they can't relate with Infor LN, they will definitely recognize BaaN. At one point, when BaaN won Boeing as their account, there was a prediction that BaaN may be a clear threat to SAP. But unfortunately, running an ERP company requires more than just the technical prowess to handle the workload at the SAP levels. BaaN would have been a tragic story. But, good for the product that it found its p...
Jul 05, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 344
Send us Fan Mail While you might feel that SAP does not care for the SMB market, SAP Business One is one of the most successful products. SAP Business One incorporates all the great features such as financial control and relationship map, along with the speed of the HANA database. SAP Business One also has a similar data model and architecture as their other product, which provides the SAP experience at a fraction of the costs. But SAP Business One Cloud is not as advanced as its on-prem variant...
Jul 05, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 340
Send us Fan Mail The large companies that are present in more than 10 countries and have more than 50K employees need operational efficiencies at a different scale. The efficiencies at the plant or at the entity level are no longer enough. You need to figure out the shared services model where the lower-cost services can be provided by the countries where the costs are likely to be lower. But managing this process requires changes in the systems and processes. You need to share data across the e...
Jul 04, 2022•44 min•Ep. 343
Send us Fan Mail If you're an e-commerce brand, kitting would not be new to you. Kitting could be a great tool to increase the average order value and differentiate yourself from the competition without necessarily launching a new product line. But kitting requires your inventory to be aligned across channels to deliver the intended results. Without the inventory alignment, it may result in missed opportunities, customer experience issues due to not getting their orders as per their timeline, an...
Jun 30, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 342
Send us Fan Mail If you are an eCommerce brand and starting on the eCommerce journey, 3PL may appear to be an attractive option. You might feel that the only thing matters for eCommerce is sales and marketing. But as you advance in your journey, you will quickly realize how critical your operations are for your customer experience. If your customers can't receive the right products at the right time, they will not stick with you for very long, regardless of how compelling could be your messaging...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 341
Send us Fan Mail Digital commerce initiatives require your product, channel, and customer data in order. Or they might not pay off as you might never get the desired results from them as you expect. While both B2B and B2C eCommerce efforts have their share of challenges, the B2B space experiences complex relationships and hierarchies that drive the process intricacies. These relationships could be because of how the relationships are set up, how contracts are structured, and how each of them are...
Jun 27, 2022•43 min•Ep. 339
Send us Fan Mail When it comes to blanket orders, the business community has mixed feelings about whether they add real value to the business. But their implementation could be all over the place as well. The legacy systems that didn't support the blanket order functionality natively had to come up with creative ways of handling them. These creative ways might include canceling the lines and adding new ones as the quantity gets released. Or they could be as dramatic as creating a completely new ...
Jun 23, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 338
Send us Fan Mail When you look at the eCommerce fulfillment space, there are many options out there. And most of these options could appear very similar. In fact, sometimes it's very hard to spot the difference between a 3PL and an eCommerce fulfillment software, as both software might appear similar. Just because your Shopify can integrate with their 3PL software, it's not meant to be a replacement for your order management platform. It should not even be compared in the software category. It's...
Jun 22, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 337
Send us Fan Mail When it comes to ERP software designed for manufacturing, you will find dozen of options. But none of them come close to meeting the needs of complex manufacturers. Even the software that will claim to be designed for hybrid manufacturing and raved by their customers are really lean on manufacturing capabilities. One of the critical differentiators for most manufacturing software is their BOM and data model. Lose correlation of BOM data elements could have significant implicatio...
Jun 21, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 336
Send us Fan Mail One T-shirt takes around 700 gallons of water to manufacture. This is how important the water industry is that not many people understand. The water industry also has a complex sales cycle with several handshakes in the process. And yet it has one of the most legacy processes for the aftermarket industry, with the majority of the sales processes not being digital. But is that changing? Would existing solutions in the market be sufficient for the water industry? If not, then what...
Jun 20, 2022•32 min•Ep. 335
Send us Fan Mail Most eCommerce companies can't survive without dropshipping. They might not have the funds to carry the inventory or build fulfillment centers to support customers in every location. But dropshipping is not as easy as building the website, finding the vendors, and start collecting cash. Incorporating dropshipping processes as part of your operational and financial workflow is even more challenging. And if your ERP system doesn't have dropshipping processes built as part of the s...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 334
Send us Fan Mail When it comes to the options available for eCommerce merchants in the QuickBooks ecosystem, there is no shortage. In fact, we have so many options that sometimes it might be a project in itself to find the right tools and use them for the purpose it was originally designed for. There are inventory tools that might also play the role of a PIM. There are other inventory tools that might also have multichannel capabilities. Then there are inventory tools that might also function li...
Jun 15, 2022•59 min•Ep. 333
Send us Fan Mail There have been several attempts to segment manufacturing processes such as make-to-order, make-to-stock, engineer-to-order, and project-based manufacturing. Some segment it based on discreet vs. process manufacturing. But the reality is that the manufacturing industry is so broad that each micro-vertical could be unique with its processes. For example, one of the biggest differentiators from the ERP process perspective is the lead time and complexity of the manufacturing proces...
Jun 14, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 332
Send us Fan Mail While the products get the most attention in a manufacturing company, the packaging is equally important when it comes to the CPG world. Also, the systems and operational needs are completely different when we compare different players in the packaging industry, starting from packaging suppliers, packaging R&D organizations, and consulting companies. They all might require multiple systems in the architecture to ensure that the ERP systems are not being overengineered and th...
Jun 13, 2022•52 min•Ep. 331
Send us Fan Mail Not many businesses understand how to capitalize on the synergies of truly globally integrated organizations. They struggle to bring all the departments together from one plant. Bringing together all the entities and sites in one system is a much harder lift than you would think. Sometimes you may be lucky to be forced into it as your customers might be requesting centralized order processing or consolidated invoicing. And then, you might be distributing them from locations most...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 330
Send us Fan Mail There are many different apps out there in the eCommerce space. Some go by eCommerce operations platform. Some call them multi-channel management platforms. Some can do warehouse management and proof of delivery. Some even claim that how they are going to change the industry by replacing the bigger daddies of the enterprise software world, such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Infor, and Epicor. But most of these apps are present in the QuickBooks or Xero ecosystem just because these ...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 329
Send us Fan Mail There is a very thin line between mainstream and project-based manufacturing. Is software development manufacturing? How about constructing a house? The manufacturing systems that are designed for mainstream manufacturing, such as make-to-stock, made-to-order, configure-to-order, and engineer-to-order, are very different. While they might claim to do project-based manufacturing, they hardly have a costing wrapper to track different jobs for that project. It's almost like once in...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 328
Send us Fan Mail While Sales and operations planning is the shared responsibility of both sales and operations. Sales typically have far more clout while procurement with very little to no say in it. And as a result, most SMB organizations end up stocking the inventory far more than they need. And this overstocking results in the locking of cash and profitability issues. This is especially common with SMBs that are smaller and don't have PE or VC investment with them. In today's episode, our gue...
Jun 06, 2022•46 min•Ep. 327
Send us Fan Mail When most people think of integration, they just feel that as long as you have APIs, you should be good. Well, the integration projects could be harder than building software from the ground up. When you build or implement software, you speak one language. On the other hand, when you integrate two software, you speak two, if not more. One option to integrate two software would be to have them talk without a translator. While this might be OK in some scenarios, the problems becom...
Jun 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 326
Send us Fan Mail Did you know that only 10% of the sellers on Amazon generate over $100,00 a year? And while 90% of these sellers have the same complexity as their peers at $100 million, they don't have the same deep pockets to spend the money on integration and IT. While the options may not be perfect, they need a quick way of synching data from across the channels and system. Also, at this scale, the strategy to somehow manage with a fragmented set of apps and web hooks-based integration is pr...
Jun 01, 2022•59 min•Ep. 325
Send us Fan Mail If Infor is the largest ERP vendor that no one knows about, SAP Business ByDesign is the product from the largest ERP vendor that no one knows about. Some even doubt if there is any future for the product. The SAP resellers like to cannibalize products from their own portfolio in the hope of getting much higher license dollars from customers, even if it means that they might feel overwhelmed with the larger product. So does SAP even care for SMBs? If they do, have they done anyt...
May 31, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 324
Send us Fan Mail Inventory and on-time delivery are two major factors that show that your processes may require transformational change. These issues could lead to long production meetings chasing late orders or raw materials. They could also lead to ad-hoc arrangements and process inefficiencies that might be the implications of the band-aid solutions implemented to cure short-term operational problems. Having accurate inventory and a controlled supply chain requires a holistic understanding of...
May 30, 2022•48 min•Ep. 323
Send us Fan Mail Discrete manufacturing space is crowded with several solutions. But there are only a few that are really good at process manufacturing and agriculture verticals. The process manufacturing has unique nuances with requirements such as traceability, sub-lots, sub-batches, and formulation management. These verticals also have unique reporting and audit requirements. Managing them could be a challenge with a vanilla ERP. And it might turn out to be extremely expensive. So why is Sage...
May 26, 2022•59 min•Ep. 322
Send us Fan Mail Most people don't understand the importance of requirement management when it comes to ERP. ERP should be as easy as dumping your SKUs, customers, and vendors inside the ERP system. And that's it, right? Well, the ERP system could quickly become the black box, similar to the tribal knowledge sitting in people's heads. So what are the best practices for managing ERP requirements? And how to ensure that the critical decisions are well-documented? In today's episode, we invited a p...
May 25, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 321
Send us Fan Mail Selling on multiple channels is hard. They all have their rules and unique business models. Also, the channels and marketplaces are evolving on a daily basis. If you were to manage each of the channels manually, it could quickly become your day job to manage them. Also, even if you were able to do that, you might still run into scenarios of stockouts and struggle to maintain consistent pricing across channels. You not only need the centralized management of your product data. Yo...
May 24, 2022•58 min•Ep. 320
Send us Fan Mail Cannabis is a unique industry. You have significant reporting requirements that are ever-changing. And the priorities may change overnight due to the investment risks associated. Also, you run the risk of losing your license if you cannot comply with the requirements. For these reasons, the unsettling nature of ever-changing requirements may make planning for ERP implementations increasingly difficult. But are there unique reporting and audit challenges in Canada? Or is Cannabis...
May 23, 2022•45 min•Ep. 319
