NetSuite for Retail Industry
Retailers across categories would agree with the fact that the customer is no more making a choice among a few options, the choice is between hundreds of options. These options do not just involve brands, it includes products, categories, channel, pricing, promotion, and medium. A lot of this dynamism has been around for some time now, the pandemic just spurred this even more.
Retailers struggle with attracting and retaining customers, keeping up with their ever-changing expectations, and delivering a delightful shopping experience. They also need to be aware of supply chain-related constraints. All decisions of retailers revolve around how to extend the right multichannel experience to customers, how to build customer loyalty, how to reduce COGS, and how to identify and execute the right marketing activities.
As retail businesses expand with multiple outlets in multiple locations, it complicates business flows and processes even further. Many of their challenges stem from traditional stand-alone software that is not designed to accommodate & streamline complex workflows while scaling up.
Only data and business intelligence can help Retailers respond to these concerns.
What are the challenges retailers face while managing using POS systems?
Data Integration between outlets: A retail store or a restaurant business with multiple chains, would need a separate POS system for each outlet that would record customer data, invoice details, payments, purchases, and other records depending on the business type. Integrating all these data across stores is a challenge.
Administrative hassles: A complete view of the entire business is possible only after integrating the scattered data across all functions and outlets. This means that staff must spend additional time gathering, collating, and analyzing these data.
Data Errors: Since data presentation involves manual intervention, there are higher chances of errors in accounting, inventory updating, and other data points.
Absence of complete visibility: In the absence of real-time visibility of information like inventory, order, customer & financials, decisions with regards to inventory management, order- fulfillment, and customer support will be ineffective and delayed.
Siloed Inventory & Order Management: Traditional systems will contribute to siloed inventory & order management. This contributes to the absence of order orchestration and inventory visibility issues.
How can NetSuite support Retail businesses?
NetSuite ERP has a deep understanding of retail businesses and their unique challenges across domains. NetSuite is designed and built to incorporate the leading practices for retailers. It is built with a Customer Lifecycle Engagement process, more than a hundred pre-built reports, pre-configured roles with business intelligence metrics, and much more. NetSuite ties together the best-of-the-breed capabilities with extended ERP capabilities, offered at a competitive price point affordable for an emerging mid-market company without the need to venture into larger tier solutions.
Key Features of NetSuite Retail:
Instore POS: Offers a comprehensive Point of Sale system, that integrates with both back-office & front-office. NetSuite POS combined with the financial package offers an ideal solution for capturing those voluminous POS transactions. Get faster checkout with integrated payment processing, an easy-to-use touchscreen interface, and safe and secure transactions. It offers rich functionality & real-time visibility of inventory, and customer orders across both online & offline channels, facilitating omnichannel capabilities.
Order management: Manage orders from across channels like POS, web (eCommerce), mobile, or kiosk, in one place. Get a real-time view of inventory from warehouses, stores, 3PLs, and drop-ship locations. Easily manage returns and exchanges. Pursue intelligent fulfillment by channeling online order fulfillment with the right warehouse or drop-ship location.
Inventory & Supplier Management: Get real-time inventory visibility, track transfers between subsidiaries or locations, track and manage inventory adjustments and their impact, and audit current inventory positions at defined intervals. Through the supplier portal, allow vendors to interact with the business and let them access invoices and orders, track purchase orders for each supplier, prepare for incoming supply with delivery date management, and set up KPIs to manage success factors and compliance.
E-commerce: Connect eCommerce with your operational business systems, maintain user experiences with responsive designs, manage real-time inventory data displaying availabilities, and much more. It offers optimized web stores responsive across devices and supports dynamic merchandising and multi-site and multi-country support. Manage promotions and marketing with coupons and cross-selling offers too.
Financials & Accounting: Supports accounting functions like general ledger, accounts receivable, and accounts payable in real-time with drill-down capabilities to report better from financial statements, integrate vendor payments and optimize procure-to-pay, prebuilt tax compliance to process sale transactions and assess by summary financial reports for any part of the business anytime.
CRM & Marketing: Get a 360-degree view of your customer across all channels, build customer loyalty through focused programs, define customer profiles with rich data for sales and marketing usages, target customers with personalized messages, and manage customer service with fully integrated case and support tracking.
Why should Retail organizations go for NetSuite?
Single Commerce Platform: NetSuite offers an omnichannel shopping and service experience. Reduce your integration costs with a single cloud platform across the front end and back end. Smoothens communication and integration with other applications, improving capabilities.
360 Degree view of the Customer: Get a complete view of customers’ shopping activity, and preferences, and design effective marketing campaigns based on the insights.
Intelligent Order Orchestration: NetSuite enables omnichannel fulfillment with centralized order management and gets a single view of inventory across all channels and supply chains.
Transforming In-Store Customer Experience: Offer a delightful shopping experience with a modern POS solution that unifies the physical and digital experience perspectives. Give your sales associates complete inventory and customer information on their mobile to engage with customers more effectively, and drive more sales and customer satisfaction.
Metrics-based Management: NetSuite equips your organization with dashboard analytics covering inventory and sales reports, expenses, and marketing campaign ROI, and gets customized reports to your requirements. View all these statistics as KPIs, graphical report snapshots, and trend graphs in real time.
How can the right NetSuite Implementation Partner help?
An award-winning software solution by itself will not be able to transform your business digitally. It takes collaboration with a competent team to do that. In addition to selecting the best cloud ERP solution out there, it takes a capable team with expertise in NetSuite implementation across domains.
The right NetSuite implementation partner would collaborate closely with the Retailer organization’s functional teams to understand processes and workflows, based on which processes would be mapped to the solution. This must be followed by extensive project planning and design reviews. A right execution approach with the right training enables a smooth transition to the new system. Once the project goes live, support and metrics evaluation help in delivering superior customer value.
