There’s no doubt it can get challenging to keep all of your orders in sync while simultaneously trying to grow your Apparel & Footwear company. As you become more successful, you start to struggle with knowing what quantities of stock you have available to promise and to sell to your customers. After all, this is one of the most crucial aspects of ensuring profitability. Without the ability to calculate stock levels for any future given date, you will see a rise in friction in the sales department. Lacking this key knowledge means more manual processes, adding unnecessary stress to your sales team.

Manual processes definitely take a toll on your productivity. Your ultimate goal is to phase out as many as possible manual processes, as they can prevent your sales team from making timely decisions regarding delivery dates for their customers. You may even experience circumstances where delivery dates are missed and customers get short-shipped. If you are not careful, these occurrences become a normal part of how you do business, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You’re probably thinking that a goal of getting rid of manual processes sounds a lot easier to accomplish than it actually is. SAP Business One, with the help of Third Wave Business Systems, can help you accomplish this goal.

As your business grows and your customer base expands, you often experience additional challenges regarding color, size, and style. Because order fulfillment can get rather time consuming, it’s important to have a solution that can directly address these potential issues.

Your overall goal is to increase revenue, while being able to keep your staffing levels consistent. How is this possible with some many underlying complications/potential issues? Unless new automated processes are introduced, your organization will most likely become burdened by inefficiencies. So where do you turn next?

SAP Business One, with Third Wave Business Systems, is the answer to managing the above business challenges. Now, you’re probably wondering about the costs associated with SAP Business One. The real answer to this question is not directly in the numbers, but really the configuration and benefits. No other solution is going to give you the efficiency that SAP Business One will.

In terms of next steps to take, you best bet is to talk with someone about what the best options are for your organization. It is unrealistic to consider cost alone without taking into consideration other factors that will impact your potential growth, like benefit. How does the cost of implementing a new system weigh in comparison to the benefit you will gain from it? You may be paying for the system, but as a result will see a reduction in labor costs due to streamlining processes. You will be able to better manage inventory, reducing the need for keeping unnecessary stock, further reducing costs. SAP Business One helps you retain your current customers, while freeing up time and resources for new customers. Ultimately, you will see a growth in business, and compared to the initial cost of the system, the payoff in the end is insurmountable.

If you are looking to do away with manual processes, better manage product specifications, and increase revenue, all while keeping costs low, SAP Business One can deliver. Contact Third Wave Business Systems today and learn about how the benefits of such a dynamic system can outweigh the costs. We look forward to speaking with you!

As mentioned in our previous blog post, How to Successfully Retain Customers in the Apparel Footwear Industry, successfully retaining customers in the Apparel & Footwear industry is boosted with SAP Business One (SAP AFS). This blog will go into detail about how to gain insight into your business with Business One and keep your customers happy.

With SAP Business One, you have a powerful solution that enhances the relationships you have with your customers. With a key function built into Business One’s easy to use interface, you will get access to complete and accurate customer information, including your sales pipeline, backorder lists, credit information, and available promotions.

Since you can easily track the purchase history of each customer, it’s easy to anticipate and suggest relevant upsell and cross-sell opportunities that they will appreciate, especially since you’ll have such quick and easy access to the data that defines which customers are the most frequent. This kind of insight allows you to exceed expectations and meet each customer’s individual needs, which in turn makes them feel taken care.

The more you meet customer needs, the more efficient you are because you can focus resources on the customers that will give you the most profitability in your industry. To keep them happy, and retain them, you want to reward them for their sales activity.

Keeping Customers happy with SAP AFS

1. Offer your customers targeted discounts

For example, say you’re a salesperson at XYZ Clothing Co., an Apparel & Footwear distributor. SAP Business One gives you a single screen where you can see all your key information in a view configured for your sales role. Within Business One, you can access information on sales, services, finance, & purchasing. Today, you want to offer special pricing to one of your customers who purchase from XYZ Clothing Co. regularly.

To accomplish this, you start by accessing the Inventory module within Business One & drilling down into the pricing section. Next, by choosing your customer name, you can bring up that entire customer’s past orders.

In this example, you want to discount a certain style of jean. Find the style of jean in the pricing section and choose how much you want to discount off the base price. You can even save discount information for future reference. Now the customer will automatically get the discount every time they order that style of jean.

Related: Who is Your Target Client?

2. Analyze Sales and Inventory

You just entered a discount for a style of jean for one of your customers. To better understand this customer’s buying pattern, you can easily drill down into their account and see detailed information like ordering patterns, pricing patterns, and more.

Additionally, you can see how long they’ve been active for, what their account balance is, who their main contacts are, what orders and deliveries are outstanding, and what future opportunities are available for the customer. You even have the option to leave notes in a specified section, keeping your colleagues in the loop.

Then, you will want to look at that customer’s transaction history, where Business One gives you analysis and detailed information so you can better manage the account, offer the products your customer needs, and assess sales by month. For example, a graph may show a spike in jean sales every September whereas May and August were slow.

Learn More: SAP Business One: Inventory and Distribution

3. Monitor Product Support

You want to be able to understand and manage the customer’s support needs as time progresses. In Business One, you can easily view past support-related projects that are either opened or closed. By drilling down into any open tickets, you can view information on why and how the project was not completed by looking at the root cause of the issue(s), who initiated the support work, and what the initial issue was. This feature is important because it gives you the option to always follow up with your customer and see why the matter is still open.

With SAP AFS and Third Wave Business Systems for Apparel & Footwear companies, you can stay on top of issues that impact customer satisfaction. As you have learned, SAP AFS can analyze your sales & inventory and monitor product servicing, while making your customers feel important.

To better satisfy your customers and keep them coming back to your Apparel & Footwear company with SAP AFS, contact Third Wave Business Systems today.

How to Successfully Retain Customers in the Apparel & Footwear Industry

It’s no doubt that this is a pretty challenging economic climate, regardless of what industry you’re in. But for Apparel & Footwear companies, you want to make sure you are able to satisfy your client base during these growing times. Your clients are the ones you count on to stay profitable, after all. This profitability is directly related to what Enterprise Resource System (ERP) you use. When most growing Apparel & Footwear companies look for an ERP system, they often think a solution like SAP is too complex and as a result choose a solution that is inadequate for their business, leading to inefficient process. The truth is – the more inefficient the processes, the harder it is to retain clients.

You know how essential it is to generate a unique buying experience that satisfies clients’ purchase requirements, thus convincing them to keep coming back. The challenge you will face, though, is the fact that in the Apparel & Footwear industry it can complex to manage a company with both retailers and individual requirements. You’ll often have to process enormous, high volume of order with unique specifications like color & style combinations. With SAP Business One and Third Wave Business Systems, you have the right ERP tools to satisfy clients’ purchase requirements and encourage them to keep coming back. Reduce time on the order-to-fulfillment process and more time on expanding your brand.

Ultimately, SAP Business One and Third Wave will enable you to create clients loyalty and drive your profits, while eliminating manual processes and keeping your staffing levels consistent. Here are a few strategies you can use to satisfy your customers in the Apparel & Footwear industry:

Anticipate What Clients Will Need & Want Before They Do:  This is the greatest way you can engage your client base. Business One enables you to analyze the buying patterns & behaviors of your clients who make routine purchases. In turn, you will be more proactive at driving sales while preventing those same clients from shopping around with your competitors. Additionally, anticipating what your clients may need & want can also help predict what their future requirements may be, based on the timing and frequency of their purchases. In the end, you can then offer them recommendations based on marketing profiles and target groups.

Which Clients Are Most Profitable?:  It’s crucial to your company’s success that you can examine when purchases were made, the frequency of orders, and the revenue generated from those orders. That way, you can segment your clients according to their value. Of course, this doesn’t mean that only high-revenue clients are valuable. A clients who buys less but requires no additional support may be just as profitable and valuable to you. By knowing the means of your profitability, you can cultivate positive relationships and use predictive modeling in SAP Business One to segment and cluster clients based on what behaviors you anticipate seeing.

Deliver Superior Support:  Without the ability to make and meet your promises for goods and services in a timely manner, you’ll most likely never be able to deliver superior customer support. When a client places an order, salespeople should be able to quickly analyze the product requirements and make accurate promises regarding the order quantities they can fulfill/promise. Since SAP Business One will integrate with your inventory and supply chain applications, you can easily create and manage client orders, generate quotes and proposals, check product availability, and track orders through the fulfillment process. With this supply chain visibility comes the ability to avoid missed promise dates and product misallocation while reducing stock outs. By knowing what is available to sell and what inventory you can promise to your clients, you’re able to meet your delivery commitments.

Maximize Client Lifetime Value: By using SAP Business One, you can be strategic and enhance the value that each client can deliver over the course of your business relationship. Isolate issues that drive up support costs by analyzing your clients’ interactions, giving you more insight into what processes need adjustments and eliminating the need for additional support.

Instantly increase client profitability while increasing your revenue. The overall benefits SAP Business One has for the Apparel & Footwear industry is insurmountable. By easily scaling up sales, maintaining a constant level of staffing, and being educated on what quantities of stock you can sell/promise, you will improve your overall margins.

Step 3: Standardize Methods for Data Representation and Data Integration

You have many business functions to manage, along with applications that support these business functions. But were these applications designed and developed to meet each function’s immediate operational needs? Since each developer has their own set of visions for the technical aspects of the system, you may experience inconsistencies in the definitions or representations of a customer or product depending on the application you’re using. These inaccurate representations are seen primarily in the data going into and coming out of the application. Furthermore, depending on how current the application’s technology is will dictate the differences in how the data sets are stored. For example, you may have various lists or filed-based data sets that require a more complex indexed database system, but you may not be able to access all the information you want to because the technology is incompatible or outdated.

So what does all this mean for your Business Intelligence system? When you present business intelligence results for review, seeing inconsistencies between generated reports casts doubt on the entire BI system. The most common inconsistencies are seen when data sets are brought together for analytical purposes, and in turn, your data elements, names, definitions, data types, etc. are also questionable. Ultimately, when two reports are not consistent, it raises suspicions about all the reports you produce.

How do you get accurate representations using business intelligence and reduce the negative impact of variation? To make forward progress and inspire increased trust in your reports and analyses, you need to make the following consistent across the board:

• Standardize the definitions
• Data element representations
• Table structures
• Overall data model used for core business information concepts
• Techniques and tools that you use to move data from the source systems to the data warehouse

Are you constantly trying to better analyze your data to secure your organization’s future? Do you feel like you struggle with keeping a focus on important business functions, like streamlining operations, increasing your revenue, and outpacing competition? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, it’s time for you to reevaluate your business information. You need to ability to determine where to concentrate your efforts, but where do you start?

Since you can’t be constantly checking every detail of what’s done, you want to monitor your operations and be alerted to potential issues when they occur. You need to be able to focus on quickly finding and resolving potential problems without getting sidetracked. Fortunately, Business Intelligence can enable you to do just that. With Business Intelligence, you can identify new ways to leverage opportunities, despite the current uncertainty of our economy.

So, what is Business Intelligence? Business Intelligence allows your organization to better understand, monitor, analyze, and predict what is occurring in the overall environment of your company. It allows you to turn your data into useful information and distribute it to those who need it, wherever they need it, by whatever means they choose (tablet, smart phone, etc). Essentially, BI saves you time and allows you to make better informed decisions. Since you can combine data from a wide variety of sources for an integrated, up to date view, BI is a win/win solution.  Here are a few examples of what Business Intelligence can do for your organization:

• Identify your best selling products to compare against all your distribution channels
• Identify which of your customers are cutting back on their purchases
• Monitor social media sites to analyze and gain insight
• Catalog & store current historical reports and analytics to use in the future for any decision making processes
• Implement dashboards & scorecards so that executives can recognize operational exceptions and KPIs
• Monitor a marketing campaign in real time – and as a result get back analytics as to whether or not it is successful, should be tweaked, or should be cancelled
• Track customer orders and desired ship dates to properly adjust the production cycle
• Integrate data from spreadsheets to provide consistency and “a single version of the truth”
• Align your daily operations with strategic objectives to keep them in agreement
• Make data-driven informed decisions

So now that you know what BI can do for you, how do you know whether or not you need it? If you experience the opposite of any of the above points, then you most likely don’t have the information you need. Often, you will experience limited operational flexibility if you don’t have BI in place. Because of this, you don’t have as much insight into what’s going on in your company, therefore prohibiting you from quickly reacting to negative situations as promptly as you’d like to. With a limited scope of analysis, you can’t achieve a complete view of your customer base and can’t integrate your data into your CRM system. Basically, without BI, you can’t meet your client demands as your company grows.

Simply put, if you’re looking to improve the overall quality of your business and decision making process, as well as the overall effectiveness of your organization, you need Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence can help you make better decisions, better manage your business, analyze and understand your organization’s plans and results, and provide insight into what’s working correctly while identifying potential problem areas. Contact Third Wave today and get on a path to strong Business Intelligence today!

Third Wave has had a busy past few months! Last month, we attended the 2012 America SAP User Group (ASUG) SAP Business One Summit in Dallas, TX. This special event is hosted every year, is free of charge, and allows attendees to learn about SAP Business One and how it can help small businesses in our changing technological world. Third Wave is proud to be a part of the ASUG community – a dynamic group of individuals striving to deliver value, intelligence, and action, while acting as a vital source of value for SAP.

This year’s event hosted over 500 individuals from all over the country, providing ample opportunities for these attendees to get a closer glimpse at the solutions and technologies provided by various SAP Business One business partners. Third Wave was lucky enough to be one of these prominent contributors.

Korey Lind, CEO, our Director of Software Development, Gopal Viswanathan, along with a few other Third Wave consultants were an integral part in the daily training classes hosted by ASUG.

Third Wave’s SAP add-on products that were presented include Return Materials Authorization (RMA), Chargeback Processing, Credit Card Processing, and ShipEasy.

In addition, Third Wave hosted a seminar on how to eliminate error-prone, labor-intensive, spreadsheet-based approaches to planning and budgeting at all/any level – financial, Business Partners, and/or products.

Finally, Gopal Viswanathan was featured in a seminar on how to increase productivity by changing form behavior, setting data validation rules, and how to streamline processes via easy point and click tools.

Third Wave is proud to have had such an impact at the 2012 ASUG Business One Summit. Korey, Gopal, and the rest of the team who participated had nothing but positive things to say about this year’s event.

If you attended one of Third Wave’s seminars and have any questions about content that was presented, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Are you a small to mid-sized enterprise that is growing? Do you worry about your ERP for inventory management as growth progresses? Since inventory is where you make your profits, you want to focus the majority of your energy on managing your inventory in real-time. As your company continues to grow, you will probably struggle with inventory management and operations. Ultimately, you want to be able to serve your clients better and achieve profitable growth. But how is this possible?

What it comes down to is having the appropriate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in place.  SAP Business One, with the help of Third Wave Business Systems, is the top provider of ERP for small to midsized enterprises looking to manage inventory in real-time. Although you may be happy with your current systems, if you are looking to do any of the following, Business One is the answer for you:

• Automate the order to delivery process
• Manage inventory in real-time
• Adapt to changing organizational needs
• Streamline end-to-end operations
• Plan for inventory updates with Materials Requirements Planning (MRP)
• Predict & plan for Purchasing materials by using Sales Orders
• Serve clients faster and better
• Achieve profitable growth

Are you a Small to Mid-sized Organization Specializing in Distribution?

Do you find yourself struggling to keep up with your organization’s functions, such as Financials and Inventory Management? A lot of similar businesses in your industry face relentless competitive pressure to keep prices low and increase volume. You are on the constant lookout for ways to improve margins and increase revenue. By focusing on decreasing operating expenses and cutting costs throughout the order-to-cash process, you would be able to manage inventory with increased efficiency. Simply put, you want to be able to integrate your overall operations more tightly with your clients and suppliers. But how do you do it? What it all comes down to is having the right business system to incorporate all of your needs into one, user-friendly platform. This is when you turn to SAP Business One.

SAP Business One is the Best User-Friendly Business Management Solution Designed Precisely for Distribution Companies.

This powerful software deploys a single solution that provides functionality supporting every process you need to run your business: Financials, Sales, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Inventory, Operations, and more. If you feel like you’ve outgrown your accounting-only solution and want to streamline your operations with an integrated, on premise solution, look no further. SAP Business One excels at streamlining operations by automating and integrating all critical business functions, allowing you to respond quicker to client needs and make consistent informed decisions. Business One is cost effective to integrate and maintain while being completely adaptable, meaning it can be readily tailored to your specific business requirements. As a result, you are able to better serve your clients and gain overall operational efficiency.

You’re probably asking how the above functionality can properly integrate in with your distribution company. The following ways detail how SAP Business One works in conjunction with your specific industry needs:

• Streamline the Order-To-Cash Process: SAP Business One does so through an automated supply and distribution chain
• Reduce Costs: With optimized inventory management capabilities, you will see an immediate drop in costs
• Automated: Diminish additional supply or waste, paper work, and costly shipping errors with an automated system
• Improve Profit Margins: Business One offers efficient quoting capabilities
• Increase Customer Satisfaction: With faster and more accurate order processing, your customers also reap the benefits of SAP Business One

Third Wave Business Systems has a skilled team of experts who specialize in deploying the SAP Business One solution to clients in the Distribution sector. They have helped build systems that tailor the individual needs of not only the company, but the industry as well. Contact Third Wave today to learn how you can gain a competitive edge in the Distribution industry!