Profitable retailers are laser-focused on leveraging profit margins to the fullest. However, profit margins can be restrained by a variety of organizational limitations, retail IT integration being one of them. In a retail IT ecosystem where new and old business systems create silos & value traps, retailers wrangle with profitability challenges which captivate cash benefits.
Experts believe that top to bottom IT integration can help retailers in eliminating these silos, fast forwarding revenues, and improving profit margins. Here are some common scenarios where enterprise IT integration improves retail profit margins:
Early Invoice Processing and Cash Benefits
Many suppliers offer early payment discounts to retailers. However, obtaining these discounts on early payments is not an easy task and there are number of caveats which squeeze cash benefits. Retailers are restrained by the ability to map and normalize invoice data, reconcile invoices, and deal with exceptions. Operational & data transformation issues disrupt early payments and restrain retailers from receiving cash benefits.
Enterprise integration provides right components to destroy these obstacles and speed up invoice processing at a much lower operational cost. With automated data standardization, retailers can accept invoices from multitude of sources like API, XML, or web services and process them into the backend of other systems. Users can also set up exception handling rules to process invoices in specific ways. Retailers can get end-to-end visibility of every invoice, process them faster, and take advantage of early payment discounts. Another way to speed up the process is to use ePayables to pay your suppliers.
Smoother Supplier Onboarding
Supplier onboarding is cumbersome and often very time-consuming. Suppliers use heterogeneous data formats to process information. For instance, some suppliers use XML while others use CSV format to send information. Even retailers with advanced competency centers face problems in combining these disparate pieces of data, converting them into a standardized format, and feeding them into ERP systems for transactions.
Profitable retailers are tackling this challenge with enterprise IT integration. It enables business users to streamline onboarding process for making it fast, smooth, and reliable. Business users can build custom workflows for supplier onboarding without IT intervention or heavy coding. Custom workflows also enable users to receive and map a colossal amount of data from suppliers in a standardized format and accelerate data interchange.
Triggers for Applying Supply Chain Chargebacks
Performance management of suppliers and distributors is fundamental for success of retail business. Retailers should effectively monitor their suppliers to avoid delays in shipment and apply chargebacks for losses. However, only a handful of retailers today have the ability to monitor performance of suppliers and distributors. Performance management becomes impossible if data from multiple sources and business systems cannot be co-related.
Enterprise IT integration simplifies data correlation and eases the job of monitoring suppliers and distributors. Supplier and distributer data from a wide range of internal or external sources can be mapped and standardized for vendor evaluation. Business users can leverage a single view of distributed vendor data and generate reports for applying chargebacks.
Retail Integration with Adeptia
Adeptia has developed a crackerjack integration solution for the retail industry. To accentuate retail growth, Adeptia enables business users to implement integration best practices focusing on partner or customer data onboarding, conversational b2b, supply chain management, inventory management, etc. Download this solution brief to know how our retail integration solution streamlines retail operations, reduces operational cost, and accelerates time to revenue.