Festive season all over the world brings excitement as it marks family gatherings, vacations, home-cooked food, and lots of shopping! Despite distinct geographies, customer preferences, and socioeconomic factors, India stands united in its cohesive obsession with binge shopping. First is Diwali sales, and then comes the Christmas offers. Customers shop like crazy during this time. Credits to Amazon Great Indian Festival sales, Myntra’s end of the reason sales, and Flipkart’s festive dhamaka days sales that give enough and even more reasons for shoppers to splurge.
For retailers, this period brings both excitement and anxiety together. On one side, this is a golden time to fetch the biggest catch, and on the other side, it puts their retail system, strategies, customer services, supply chain, technology platforms to a test. They must use a ERP Software for Retail to ease the situation.
This time becomes the most difficult for the retailers still working in silos. Since several retailers in India are not used to a mindset of investing in a unified platform to ease their burden but spend more on the on-premise infrastructure till it wears out, retailers have to go through tremendous pain during this time. Often it has been observed in shops without an integrated platform that fails to accurately forecast demands, they end up suffering losses they could have prevented.
Given below are some of the most common issues with soloed systems followed by their way-outs.
#1 Inability of Your Current Technology to Handle High Transactional Values
This is a nightmare-ish issue a company could face. However, retailers are not unfamiliar with it. Some research has shown that 96% of retailers have faced this disruption over ten times across the previous three years. Reasons may include network disruptions, third-party outrages, human errors, etc. However, the most common reason is disconnected legacy software systems. The patchwork of different technologies and functions added over time causes downtime of the system.
The Solution: As a solution, retailers should look forward to replacing their complex and hard-to-maintain siloed system with a unified software solution such as LS Retail. A unified system covers the entire business under a single platform leaving no space for communication-based disruptions caused by a lack of communication among different systems. To add up, a single provider is delivering this technology while ensuring complete support, quicker and simpler management.
#2 Inability to Figure Out the Exact Part of Your System that Goes Down
This issue can again arise due to aging and disconnected systems failing to communicate with one another. These systems are often so old they refuse to coordinate with any new system but with the now broken / unsupported hardware, such technologies are most likely to put a strain on your current system while hampering your day-to-day operations. On top of that, a system fails, it becomes extremely hard to identify which IT stack it was. How are you supposed to identify which part needs repairing?
Solution: Retailers do not have to invest in unreliable distinct system integration that hampers their smooth business functioning. Instead, it is time to spend on future technology that will not fail them. Sticking and repairing their old system and hoping for it to not fail them when they need it the most is irrelevant.
Retailers have spent years not investing in the modern technology but fixing the old one until it “works.” However, the good news for retailers is that the modern, unified commerce technology platforms are not as costly as they might guess, and they deliver a faster ROI. There are businesses like Gallo Clothing that use LS Retail and have not faced issues since.
#3 Inability to React Quickly to Customer Demands
One of the major causes of this issue might include the unavailability of stock. They are hugely damaging their bottom line. A study by IHL Group – global research and the advisory firm found that retailers miss out on about USD 1 trillion in sales only because of unavailable items. While almost one-third of shoppers turn to Amazon and other eCommerce platforms. Many retailers admitted that the reason behind these out-of-stock scenarios is their outdated technology and the reasons majorly contributing are:
- Limited view on their inventory
- Unreliable data
- Shortage of data analysis tools and accurate forecasts.
Solution: Weekly or daily reports are not relevant in today’s scenario, especially during the festive season. You need a real-time view of your data so you can track your stock, sales, and customers throughout your retail chain.
You can get real-time data availability with a single software environment consisting of your financials, warehouse, admin, inventory, CRM (Customer Relationship Manager), POS (point of sale) system, and so on. You can track sales, productivity, and stock in real-time and bring those hour-consuming replenishments to a few minutes.
Keeping the above-mentioned points in mind we can conclude that working in silos is not the best idea. It might not handle the festive pressure well. System disruptions hamper business operations and might even cause losses. The situation gets even trickier when you cannot even figure out where the issue lies. Additionally, the system is most likely to bun inefficient for handling rapid customer transactions. The best possible way out is to get a unified software solution like LS Retail a Retail management software India. It offers a set of tools required to manage a retail business. Trident Information Systems is a Gold LS Retail Implementation Partner. Contact us for a demo.
