Send us Fan Mail Just like ERP, the Bill of Materials is perhaps the overused and oversold term. A BOM could be the assembly of two materials like wrapping a gift for your birthday. Or it could be the manufacturing process of the whole spaceship. But what if the process of manufacturing a spaceship resulted in waste material that could turn into a nice lamp. Would this whole process be captured as part of the bill of materials? How would the cost be accounted for each of them? Does the BOM diffe...
Jul 28, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 357
Send us Fan Mail eCommerce is easy when you are managing a couple of stores and selling in 6-figures. But it becomes increasingly difficult when you have to manage millions and billions of transactions. While also managing the transactional depth of a complex business with thousands of channel partners. When you grow at that level, you will need different search engines for different areas of your eCommerce business. You will also need to manage a centralized CI and CD pipeline to manage the pro...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 356
Send us Fan Mail Infor M3 is a unique product that can meet specific requirements of certain industries. But do these specific requirements really matter? Can't you just customize a vanilla ERP system such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central or SAP S/4 HANA? Well, it gets really tricky for certain industries such as Fashion and Apparel, Food and Beverage, and equipment rental. It's because you need to have a richer data model tailored for these industries. The rich data model could includ...
Jul 26, 2022•59 min•Ep. 355
Send us Fan Mail Most companies feel that the insurance companies would be able to cover most financial risks for them. But without understanding your risk profile, it’s hard to predict if they will be covered. Understanding and identification of risks require a thorough analysis of your processes and supply chain and evaluating them on an ongoing basis. You might also need to monitor macroeconomic factors and how they might affect your risk profile to have complete control over your financial r...
Jul 25, 2022•47 min•Ep. 354
Send us Fan Mail Consolidated invoicing and billing are typically the outliers and don't get as much attention until they become painful issues in the organization. So what are the different variables that drive the consolidated processes? How many different types of consolidated invoicing processes exist? Does it vary by industry? Does it vary by product type? Are consolidated invoicing relevant for subscription-based products? If so, what are the data points that are relevant to capture to ens...
Jul 21, 2022•58 min•Ep. 353
Send us Fan Mail commercetools is the hottest darling of the eCommerce space. This is especially true for the people who are big on microservices architecture and are part of the MACH alliance. But headless architecture is a lot of work for brands and requires tons of capital. The only reason why companies such as Shopify and BigCommerce are so successful is that they made it turnkey for entrepreneurs to start eCommerce businesses easily without worrying about hiring expensive developers. But th...
Jul 20, 2022•57 min•Ep. 352
Send us Fan Mail Pronto is not a household name among the ERP options available in the market unless you are from Australia or New Zeeland. Also, Australia is a different beast when it comes to meeting the statutory requirements of that country. Australia's economy is heavily influenced by specific industries such as mining. Naturally, the software from Australia will have deep capabilities for those industries. But how capable is Pronto for other industries? How do they approach the market? Whe...
Jul 19, 2022•57 min•Ep. 351
Send us Fan Mail Lease accounting has a lot of moving pieces. And they are always changing due to the ever-evolving regulations around lease accounting. If you don’t keep up with your lease valuations and amortization schedules, you might be exposing yourself to financial risks. Also, these changes drive the admin costs that are required to maintain the leases. And ERP systems don’t make it any easier as they might be difficult for lease admins to use them effectively. In today's episode, our gu...
Jul 18, 2022•43 min•Ep. 350
Send us Fan Mail Choosing an eCommerce platform is hard. You have plenty of options to choose from in the market. But they all have specific capabilities and are designed for a specific purpose. Some of the nuanced options, such as gift wrap or style, could be harder to build if they are not supported natively by the platform. While the look and feel are typically the easiest to change, even that could be harder if the platform limits theme customizations. So, where does 3DCart stand compared to...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 349
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
