While there are a million reasons why companies move toward modern business processes, one thing is certain: the benefits are one-alike.
For retailers, life before and after NetSuite is night and day. Siloed applications, error-prone data, difficulty managing inventory - and much more - are just a number of stressful problems that occur without a high-level enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in place.
And when it comes to the retail industry, where customers are of the utmost importance, without solid foundations through powerful integrations and automated processes, it can be extremely hard to keep up.
Let’s take a look at how NetSuite is the solution for retail businesses.
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Financial Management
Error-prone Excel spreadsheets, and over-complicated processes for reconciliations, especially when a retailer is multi-channel and multi-regional, are all things of the past.
Finance departments are at the forefront of every retailer. To ensure successful growth, finance teams must avoid data errors as well as ensure numbers and reports are accurate.
The NetSuite benefits for retail, especially when it comes to financial management, go above and beyond:
- 40% to 60% reduced time to close with financial books
- 10% to 40% reduced audit time
- 30%-50% increased accounting staff productivity
- Improved accounts receivables
- 2% to 5% improved gross margins over time
- Improved budgeting, financial planning, and forecasting
Attaining the above numbers is possible with NetSuite. For a number of reasons.
Netsuite can be easily integrated to a wide range of third-party applications (your preferred POS, for example) and automates all applications to provide retailers with a single source of truth.
This leads to the crucial necessity of the 21st century: automated reconciliations and reporting as well as the ability to forecast and understand analytics. Not to mention, an ERP for retail can support company growth without the need to hire more accounting staff.
One of the top advantages of NetSuite is its automated and timely invoice generation and mailing to customers. Long gone are the days of attempting to figure out each customer’s or vendor’s renewal and payment due dates.
Business Visibility
To scale and measure success, it is essential to have complete visibility on all operational activities. If you’re using siloed applications, and are constantly behind in reports, it can be a messy situation when it’s time to make high-level decisions for your business.
If your business is running on multiple Excel spreadsheets that are all over the place, it’s impossible to keep track of it all. As executives, this is detrimental to growth.
NetSuite ERP for retail can:
- 30% to 60% increase in 360° visibility and knowledge of operations
- 20% to 30% improved business agility
- 30% to 50% reduction in reporting time and resources
Growth is acquired through significantly improved real-time visibility into all aspects of the business, allowing faster and strategic decision-making, leading to yearly improvements.
With greater visibility into customer purchases and interests across channels, retailers can easily monitor and prepare for the future based on historical data.
If you have an omni-channel strategy, NetSuite provides an integrated approach to each area - store, online, third-party vendors - where you can keep track of operations and opportunities throughout the purchasing process.
Access to real-time and customizable reports are easily available for all departments, enabling business managers to be independent from IT.
Enhanced Web and eCommerce Experience
As the retail industry focuses their efforts on web and eCommerce, it’s becoming increasingly essential to provide customers with an effortless online experience. If your website has complex checkout processes or siloed shipping integrations, customers will quickly move to your competitors who have better applications in place.
NetSuite ensures that retailers have:
- 10% to 35% increased online conversions with checkout enhancements
- 10% to 20% reduced cart abandonment rate
- 30% to 50% reduced time to process online orders
Retailers can expect an increased online sales potential with an integrated back-end that allows orders to be directed to the right warehouse and shipping services.
While a customer’s information and cart are easily available with automated-emails.
Store Experience
Even though online retail presence is becoming more strategic, brick and mortar stores aren’t completely obsolete. A large part of the world’s population continues to shop in stores.
If issues stemming from on-shelf inventory lead to reduced customer satisfaction and there is no way to monitor, retailers will quickly lose out and miss on potential customers as well as ways to improve.
Growth with NetSuite is possible:
- Improved store performance
- Optimized on-shelf product availability
- 3% to 5% improved customer loyalty program related sales growth
Analytics provide the ability to monitor real-time store performance versus plan (by store) to meet revenue goals and sales quotas.
Companies can easily access inventory management by store and warehouse to optimize on-shelf availability as well as reduce out of stock items and backorders.
While customers can experience positive conditions through loyalty programs within NetSuite with loyalty cards, customized emails, and campaigns.
Improved Customer Service
Customers are your top brand ambassadors and will do wonders for your business if you treat them well. If you’re running on an outdated legacy system, you will quickly have inefficiencies and disgruntled customers.
It’s rare that a company always has positive reviews, so when there is an issue and you’re unable to track the problem, customers will go elsewhere.
Benefits of ERP for retail for customer experience are:
- Improved customer service and operations
- 30% to 50% improved resolution of customer issues
- Improved accuracy of customer transactions
Customer service queries implemented through NetSuite are automated and directed to the appropriate person. Single customer records with purchase history and issues help track and resolve customer satisfaction issues.
For shipments and returns, should anything unusual pop-up, these queries are rapidly resolved thanks to the elimination of systematic errors.
Thanks to better processes, retailers are quick to notice improved customer experience and higher customer satisfaction.
Merchandising and Inventory Planning
There’s nothing quite like ordering a product and then being notified that it is out of stock. This is often the case for retailers who base inventory availability on gut feeling, without the data to back it up.
Without real-time status of inventory, it can be very difficult to manage overstock and understock. While this can stunt growth for retailers, it’s also very frustrating for customers who have to deal with the fallout of a retailer's inadequate backend.
ERP systems for retail, like NetSuite, can provide users with:
- 5% to 25% reduced out of stocks
- Improved inventory management
- Improved inventory turns
- Improved inventory planning and customer management
- Improved customer satisfaction
- 20% to 40% reduced automated inventory markdowns
Automated processes ensure that users can flag suspicious orders without manual intervention, discontinue certain products, and streamline better inventory management to reduce out-of-stock items and backorders.
It’s time to say goodbye to manually entering the detailed price points, size, color, etc. of each product. These menial tasks can all be automated, freeing up time for your employees to focus on more pertinent items.
Real-time insights by product and channel help improve customer service and help streamline omnichannel strategies and resources.
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