The Covid-19 pandemic continues to impact every other industry at an unprecedented scale. Businesses, supply chains, and even consumers’ expectations and demands have changed drastically. What worked before may no longer be viable today. Amidst widespread rising concerns of Covid-19 and local movement limitations, the retail industry is one of the firsts to face the heat.
As we can see most mega-chain retailers and malls are coping with a complete pause in their business owing to the pandemic. Even the food and beverage industry, that deals with essential commodities is facing a multitude of challenges. These challenges comprise managing escalating demands of consumers, managing supply chain disruptions, ensuring proper hygiene in their outlets, governance issues, and ensuring the safety of employees.
So what could be done to mitigate these challenges? As the lockdown has eased down some non-essential goods and services (apparel, furniture) and high ticket items (consumer electronics, jewelry) retailers need to focus more on transforming to succeed and win the battle of Covid-19 pandemic. The challenges would be building business resiliency to operate optimally and profitably during any future crises.
Digital Investment- SAP Business One a primary focus
More and more retailers are realizing the benefits of SAP Business One owing to its capabilities to manage the end-to-end process of this dynamic industry. Megamall leaders and mega-chain retailers are automating their supply chain, managing their finances, monitoring inventory levels, streamlining order fulfillment activities, and capitalizing on the right opportunities with a single ERP. They are also gaining critical insights and channelizing their marketing efforts in the right direction with business automation.
For instance, in the apparel industry, retail leaders are monitoring what all products are being brought, liked, and mostly purchased by the consumers. Imagine this feature and level of insights being extended across all your retail stores. It is a powerful application, and this is just one benefit out of many.
Retail companies that keep a sharp eye on their inventory, weekly sales, sales history, order fulfillment, financial close, purchase order management will best be resilient and able to surpass any crisis. Let’s now talk about a few more benefits that SAP Business One brings forward to the retail industry.
Retail insights begin with SAP Business One
Many big chain retailers and mega mall operators are leaning towards SAP Business One to make informed business decisions. With embedded business intelligence in SAP Business One software, the retail industry is empowered with actionable insights which help evaluate –
- The regions and stores that have the major gaps today
- Identify which store has multiple out of the stock problem
- Select individual products to dive deeper into the issue
- Helps retailers know the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, traffic sources and the behavior of specific customer segments
- Gain a picture of the vital business metrics in a matter of minutes
- Track every item efficiently with serial number and batch tracking features
- Visualize data during each phase – pre and post promotion period
- Manage and optimize the supply chain cycle by rendering complete visibility
With the COVID-19 outbreak, which is continuously on the rise, with figures not settling; nobody can predict what the future has stored for us. However, this pandemic has set us a reminder to build our business stronger and bring in the agility and innovation to take care of the crisis in the future. This will mean investing in an affordable and enterprise-ready ERP to step in the right direction. Now it is the right time for all leading retail players to safeguard their business by investing in the right software and making business more resilient.
