Article

Why Integrate? Planning for Present and Future Retail Success

by Steve Weber
CEO, nChannel,

Best practice retailers are breaking down the walls that exist between channels and integrating processes and systems to improve the customer experience and reduce operational costs. And recent research reveals that many of those businesses lagging behind are putting plans in place to make similar investments for the coming year - and the next decade.

Most retailers experiencing the holiday sales rush are scrambling to gain control of their inventory, regardless of channel. It's not just the cross-channel marketers fighting it; even pure-play internet retailers are struggling to support their search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing, Amazon stores and more.

Retailers manage assortment plans; forecast future daily, weekly and monthly demand; and try to align their inventory purchases to support their plans. They strive to have the right inventory on hand in the right location at the right time to fulfill customer demand with the least amount of inventory investment. An integrated ecommerce solution enables your retail organization to improve inventory utilization by providing intelligence needed access and manage fulfillment options. By better understanding inventory levels, you can capture missed orders and improve order fill rates utilizing inventory across the entire network-from your warehouses to your stores to your suppliers and partners.

Making the move

As we've already explored, integrating front-end and back-end systems offers many benefits:

  • Provide customers the flexibility to shop and interact through multiple channels without sacrificing of the brand experience.
  • Gain seamless coordination of order-to-fulfill processes across sales channels.
  • Get an accurate view of stock levels and order information at any customer touch point.
  • Improve inventory utilization by employing the entire retail fulfillment network ...

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Business Central Commerce Data Integration Dynamics 365 Dynamics AX Dynamics CRM Dynamics GP Dynamics NAV Dynamics SL E-Commerce Inventory Management Mobile Applications Order Management Retail Retail POS Sales & Ops Planning
About Steve Weber

Steve Weber is the CEO of nChannel.com. nChannel is a complete web-based, multi-channel management platform. nChannel can connect many of the systems you use to manage sales environments and easily manage the operations associated with multi-channel selling - using the systems you already own. Steve is a 13 year veteran and former Vice-President of eMarketplace Outsourcing Services for Sterling Commerce, a division of IBM. More recently Steve was named Microsoft Partner of the Year for Dynamics Retail and awarded Microsoft Retail Independent Software Vendor (ISV) of the year for his company's data sync solutions.

More about Steve Weber