opinion
worried about missing out on THE INCREASED demand for ecommerce?There's been a massive increase in ecommerce, increasing demand for logistics and supply chain services - and of course that's not been without it's challenges.
Intro
Ecommerce isn't new, but consumer demand has increased significantly
There's no doubt that this increase in demand is going to continue.
So, now's a great time to meet that demand, improve your service quality and reduce costs
So, where to start?
It all seems very complicated, doesn't it?
Although there are a lot of things can do as part of an ecommerce focused digital transformation, our recommended approach is to start small and simple, and build on it. This also ensures that can see a real financial return, in a shorter period of time, get buy in from your customers, and for you and your stakeholders to be more confident in your companies digital transformation.
As we do ourselves, start with your customers - ask them for a list of activities that they find time consuming, frustrating and inefficient.
Ask them to quantify it as much as possible - how much time does it take, how much rework, how many times, and at what cost (labour cost, etc). If they're not willing to disclose labour cost, then you can always estimate it based on your own knowledge.
Prioritise
From this list, you can identify what are the biggest cost items - and generally those that you want to target are a combination of highest frequency and cost.
Why not go for the biggest cost items? We usually find that the combination of frequency and cost provides a better business case - after all, there's some investment required to solve the problem.
Look at the problem holistically
Our experience also suggests that you need to look at the problem end-to-end. As you might expect, we have lots of examples of where we've had to steer our clients away from a less optimal solution.
One ecommerce client wanted to automate some manufacturing processes for a new service line. On the face of it, this made good sense. However, on talking with the client, it became obvious that, although this automation was justified, the more pressing challenge was that a large number of prospective customers for the service captured on their ecommerce website and email marketing were lost before they placed orders. So, instead we spent more time identifying and analysing the root causes for the lost prospective sales, and then returned to the factory automation challenge.
How Can We Help?
We can support you at any and all stages during this process - we can discuss with you what challenges you and your customers have, what opportunities there are and what solutions are available to help you be more successful. We have extensive experience of ecommerce, air and ocean freight, supply chain as well as related areas including manufacturing.
All you need to do is book a discovery call using the button below.
Details
Accelerate past the competition and future proof your business
Challenges
Do these sound familiar?
- Your admin teams spend a lot of time rekeying information - from paper documents - until multiple business applications
- You're dependant on a key IT person 'in house' or a small IT supplier. They're expensive and not as responsive as you'd like
- You see competitors adapting far more rapidly than your company seems able to do
- Senior managers spend too much valuable time pulling reports together from multiple sources
Solutions
Some potential solutions to your business challenges:-
- Rather than rekeying invoices, receipts, waybills, etc. your teams out in the field can capture the data automatically from a smartphone - or your admin teams can scan them in bulk
- Having got the data into the system, you can share that data with your teams (and customers), automate business processes, reporting and more.