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Is outdated technology destroying your retail business? 9 red flags to look out for

Retail ERP Software /

Your retail management system is at the heart of your business efficiency. It keeps your operations smooth, connects all parts of your business, and helps you deliver services and experiences that meet and go beyond your customers’ expectations. Still, many retailers operate on legacy IT. Often, these patched-together systems can’t sync information properly, are hard and costly to maintain don’t allow retailers to deliver the services that consumers demand. Although many retailers are afraid of the investment required by a new system, outdated tech may be already costing them more than a complete technology overhaul. Are you, like many retailers, losing competitiveness because of your outdated software systems? We have compiled a list of the top red flags you should look out for. If two or more of these points hit home, it’s time for a technology overhaul. You can’t accept product returns across channels Today’s consumers browse and shop on multiple channels, and they expect to be able to return purchases the way they like, too. According to a study by Forrester Research, consumers demand simple and easy returns, and the ability to return items bought online to brick-and-mortar store locations. “There are a lot of people who don’t even bother returning [products] because it’s such a pain, and when they don’t bother returning, they just don’t shop with you again,” says Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester.  Ask yourself: Does my current technology enable me to offer customers the abilty to buy online and return in-store? You can’t offer click and collect or curbside pickup Click and collect – also known as BOPIS, for Buy Online and Pick up In Store – is one of the most sought-after services by consumers. Curbside pickup has been around for a few years, but it surged in popularity during the pandemic. Both options are expected to remain in high demand with shoppers, as they bridge the gap between ecommerce and physical retail, and are both highly convenient and – when needed – contactless. Click and collect also holds benefits for retailers, as it has been shown to lead to larger shopping baskets as customers add unplanned items when they go pick up their purchases.  Ask yourself: Am I missing out on both sales and upselling opportunities by keeping my e-commerce and physical locations disconnected? You regularly oversell items In many retail chains, each store location runs on its own database, and the eCommerce website runs on another platform altogether. When information is saved in separate places, if the systems do not communicate with each other in real time, there is a very high chance you might sell an item on your eCommerce website even if the product is actually out of stock. At that point, you’ll have to inform the customer you can’t deliver the item they bought – losing the sale, and perhaps, the customer’s trust.  Ask yourself: Do I have out-of-sync, siloed information? Is inventory information updated too seldom, causing a stale view of inventory and overselling? You don’t give customers visibility into the inventory Consumers are increasingly taking purposeful shopping trips. Today, two out of three consumers check if the item they are looking for is available before they head out to shop, the IBM Institute for Business Value reports. If you don’t give visibility into what products are available in your stores, customers may not make the trip to your store at all. Yet, only around one third of retailers give customers access to accurate product availability across store locations, and 45% offer no access to inventory at all, according to data by Sapio Research. It’s not just consumers that don’t get the visibility they need. Less than 15% of retailers give their store associates effective inventory visibility across channels, according to BRP research. This means that sales staff can’t, for example, tell customers whether an item they desire is in stock in another store location, or instantly offer a suitable replacement. Ask yourself: Do I force shoppers to make the trip in person to find out if a product is available in my stores? Can my sales associates help consumers, looking up product availability in other locations? You waste a lot of time on manual tasks You’d be surprised at how much time is spent on doing manually tasks that could be digitized. EKN reports that two out of three retail professionals are still forced to spend time completing physical paperwork during store visits! All these physical documents must then be analyzed and transcribed, manually – leading to further waste of time and risk of errors. Crocodile International, one of our customers, told us that their accounting staff used to spend many hours at the end of each month to manually verify inventory figures against sales orders. They were forced to because of legacy systems that didn’t communicate with each other. The delayed transaction postings also made them unable to know exactly how much stock was available at a given time.  Ask yourself: Am I wasting a lot of man-hours with manual entering and double-checking of data? You can’t recognize customers across channels Today, the average shopping journey can begin with a customer seeing a new item on your Facebook page. They might then check out the item in one of your store locations, and buy it later on your eCommerce site. To engage customers, you need to be able to identify and follow them across the various channels and touchpoints they use. You must then share this information across your enterprise, and use it to create personalized interactions. Unfortunately, this is near impossible to achieve if, like many retailers, you manage each channel – perhaps each store – as a separate entity. Some companies don’t even have an integrated customer database, and valuable customer information like sales per client, payments, loyalty points, is stored in separate systems which don’t communicate with each other. The result? Duplicate information, incomplete and inconsistent records, and no clear view of who each consumer is, what they like, etc. When you don’t know your customers, you cannot design meaningful loyalty programs and rewards, deliver personalized recommendations, or offer relevant promotions. Ask yourself: Can I connect my customers’ data and use it to create personalized interactions? Or is

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Case Study: Africa Lifestyle Choose LS Retail Software and Trident as Implementation Partner

Retail ERP Software /

Africa Lifestyle Limited operates retail stores in malls and airports across Ghana, Nigeria, and several other African countries. The company carries products from popular international fashion brands such as Levi’s Jeans, as well as a wide variety of cosmetic lines including Bobbi Brown, Estee Laude’s M.A.C., and L’Oreal’s Maybelline. Africa Lifestyle Limited is dedicated to establishing a world class retail platform to deliver quality apparel, accessory, and beauty brands to customers across West Africa.  The business case  Before switching to LS Retail software, Africa Lifestyle Limited faced numerous challenges. The company was using a software solution that wasn’t suited for their scale and couldn’t keep up with the ever-changing demands of the fashion industry. The fashion business demands the ability to launch new collections and product ranges in short amounts of time. With their previous system, this became complicated at every step of the process: in product development, planning, production, supply chain and fulfillment. Africa Lifestyle Limited says limitations of the system included:  The solution  Africa Lifestyle Limited evaluated multiple solutions, but none of them encompassed of all their desired features like LS Retail software. Africa Lifestyle Limited manages its financials at their office in the UAE, while operations are managed from India and Africa, and consolidation happens at their offices in Africa. The company was drawn to LS Retail for both the system functionality in the fashion industry and the ability to manage its business remotely, from offices in different time zones, with everyone in the business working on up-to-date business information.   Trident Information Systems, an LS Retail partner with consolidated experience in LS Retail software solutions, worked with Africa Lifestyle Limited on the implementation. They communicated across the company’s three different time zones and effectively coordinated with all the locations’ teams for a successful deployment. The teamwork meant the system was up and running within 3.5 months.  The company decided to run the system in the cloud, as that would better support their international structure. They opted to host the solution on Microsoft Azure, a setup that has been serving them well.   Benefits  After moving to LS Retail software, day-to-day operations in Africa Lifestyle Limited are much easier.   Satisfied with their new system and mindful of the future of their industry, Africa Lifestyle Limited is currently reviewing additional technology such as AI-powered recommendations, as well as new ways to deliver better experiences online and across the channels with virtual product catalogues and click and collect.

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Announcing Microsoft Cloud for Retail: Built for what’s next

Retail ERP Software /

2020 was the year in which we experienced disruptive change at a pace and a scale that we could never have imagined. Yet it was also the year in which many retailers embraced digital like never before. Take REI for example, which launched a new virtual outfitting service to help customers assemble bikes, find the right hiking boots, and gear up for camping trips using Microsoft Teams. Retailers who laid their digital tracks early were more agile, resilient, and ultimately positioned for growth. I’m optimistic about the future of retail and excited by the opportunity faced in retail. But as we all know, the journey past the COVID-19 pandemic has only just begun.   That’s why we thrilled to announce the availability of Microsoft Cloud for Retail public preview beginning on March 31.   Microsoft Cloud for Retail at-a-glance At Microsoft, we are committed to helping retailers by working side-by-side with them to co-innovate and co-develop next-generation solutions that address their most pressing business opportunities. Retail is 31 percent of the world’s GDP and that data is the demand signal for the world. Microsoft Cloud for Retail data services consolidates disparate customer data sources—your data, your suppliers’ data, the data you don’t even know about yet—to uncover actionable insights in minutes, not days. Discover retail insights from all data sources—data warehouses, data lakes, and big data analytics systems—with a single, unified experience at any point in the shopper journey. Microsoft Cloud for Retail uniquely connects experiences across the end-to-end shopper journey, using a set of capabilities that deliver more relevant personalized experiences and operational excellence for sustained profitability. Few retailers have the budget or infrastructure to “rip and replace.” Microsoft Cloud for Retail starts with a modular framework so retailers can innovate as they go. This modular and deployable solution activates both end-to-end services like curbside pickup or standalone services like Intelligent Recommendations. Microsoft Cloud for Retail is designed to give retailers the flexibility to adopt the capabilities they need to address their most pressing business needs, be it better knowing customers, empowering employees, building resilient supply chains, or reimagining retail. “We are excited to explore Microsoft Cloud for Retail as a crucial tool to bring together our stores, product, and marketing systems and unlock the power of our data,” Britten Maughan, SVP of Product and Partnerships, Lids. Let’s take a closer look at how we are integrating capabilities across the shopper journey. Demand generation Driving interest and awareness in your product or service is the beginning of the shopper journey. Using the right digital marketing channels with the right solution is critical in attracting new customers. E-commerce personalization. Showcase how well you know your customers by delivering a shopping experience that provides relevant, personalized results through Intelligent Recommendations and product search. Intelligent recommendations can help uniquely tailor experiences and increase conversion by helping customers find what they want. See how it comes to life. Digital advertising. Target, attract, and convert more shoppers by delivering engaging, personalized experiences thereby increasing customer loyalty and return on digital marketing ad spend with Microsoft Advertising. Stores and operations Retail associates or frontline workers are critical to the success of any retailer. They are the face and humanity of every brand. That’s why we’re so focused on putting retail-specific tools into frontline employees’ hands so they can deliver best-in-class, multichannel experiences in an environment where safeguards and privacy standards are built-in. At the same time offering retailers the ability to create digital and smart stores to automate processes and use real-time data to improve operations. Associate operations and collaboration. Empower your frontline employees to manage their tasks when they are in the store or remote while using robust communication, collaboration, and sharing capabilities, as well as use shared device management for business continuity.  Digital and smart stores. Use real-time observational data to improve in-store operations, keeping check-out lines short and shoppers happy. Optimize your retail space by analyzing customer movement and product status to maximize sales. Purchase Be it online, in-store, or via social shopping, at the point of purchase we offer connected tools to drive conversion, with on-site advertising, social selling capabilities, and secure payment enablement. Anywhere commerce conversion. Enable shoppers to purchase whenever, wherever, and on whatever device they choose supported with intelligent tools to deliver personalized, intuitive, and relevant shopping experiences. Maximize customer conversion and increase your average basket of goods with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce Loss and fraud prevention. Protect your revenue from fraud using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand and detect patterns of fraudulent transactions across the shopper journey. Provide your employees tools to help decrease fraud costs, improve the customer experience, and streamline operational efficiency with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection. Fulfillment and service How do you get the physical product into the hands of the customer? Streamlining operations to make the delivery process as seamless as possible, with integrated customer support to help consumers at any point in the sales cycle. Multichannel fulfillment. Delight customers with streamline curbside pickup and buy online pick up in-store (BOPIS) operations with simplified payment processing and customer notifications. Increase employee effectiveness with optimized time management and infusing intelligence across your sales operations with AI capabilities that improve customer experience and drive better ROI.  Integrated customer service. Streamline customer service while empowering your employees to foster lasting relationships with customers via insights and delivering consistent engagement across online and offline channels. Post-purchase The journey then continues with our insight’s capabilities enabling retailers to better understand customer demand signals and cross-channel behavior with intelligent post-purchase analytics. Shopper analytics. Unlock data insights across every touchpoint of the shopper journey enabling better customer insights, better operations, and overall a better customer experience. Use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Azure Synapse to bring together multichannel data in real-time to create a full view of your customer, so you can take relevant actions to increase customer loyalty. Merchandising and distribution These customer insights feed into and inform the supply chain process of demand planning, inventory management, pricing, and distribution. Our intelligent supply chain capabilities are designed to ensure channel operations are optimized so

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Deliver faster, better service with self-checkout technology

Uncategorized /

Self-checkout technology may be nothing new – but it’s hot news in retail. The global retail self-checkout market is expected to grow 10.3% year over year until 2024, Loss Prevention Media recently reported. The ideal technology for busy consumers This predicted growth isn’t surprising, if you consider some of the biggest consumer trends. 1. DIY Do-it-yourself has become the norm for today’s consumers. From self-scanning one’s bags at the airport, to booking massages, treatments and medical appointments online, to self-management of personal finances on phone apps, the tendency to DIY has spread to most facets of life. Across ages, genders and geographies, there seems to be a shared preference for figuring things out on one’s own. Not only: many would rather interact with machines than with people. A recent consumer survey by SOTI found that as many as 66% of shoppers prefer using self-service technology over having to ask a salesperson. McDonald’s recently decided to implement self-serve kiosks, machines where people can order their meal using a screen, in all its 14,000 U.S. locations. The QSR giant tested these machines in selected restaurants, and noticed that sales were consistently higher at the machines than at the manned tills. The reason? Apparently, people are more likely to supersize their portions when a (non-judgmental) machine, rather than a staff member, is taking the order. 2. Rushed lives Today’s consumers lead busy lives, and have no time to waste. They are used to getting what they want (from information to communications to products) instantly, with a click. And when they shop in-store, they expect to do it at their own pace. They may wish to take their time picking out items – but once they are done, they want to speed through checkout, and be on their way. According to a survey by Box Technologies and Intel in the UK, 90% of shoppers actively avoid stores with long queues. 70% even said they might not go back to a store with long lines! As self-checkout terminals tend to be more compact than traditional tills, shifting to this technology means retailers can replace one manned till with multiple self-checkouts. It’s a smart way to reduce lines without having to increase the retail space. “Even if shoppers can take longer to scan products than staff members, the retailers who have implemented this technology by LS Retail have been experiencing shorter lines, and seeing more transactions per hour per square meter,” says Hilmar Vilhjalmsson, Product Owner for the self-checkout systems at LS Retail. 3. Smaller hypermarket baskets Remember the days of the big Saturday shopping trip with the family? Forget them. They are gone. Across the globe, consumers drop by at the supermarket multiple times per week, and buy just a few items at a time. According to global research done by Dunnhumby, today more than 60% of hypermarket baskets contain six or fewer items. The tendency is visible across the globe: small basket visits in hypermarkets are predicted to increase 3% year over year in Asia, 7.5% in Europe, and 11% in Latin America. Smaller baskets are ideal for self-checkout machines, as these have been shown to deliver the highest time savings when baskets of 10 items or less. 4. Increasing cost of labor According to Wells Fargo, the three industries that are most affected by rising labor costs are healthcare, finance, and retail. To maintain a healthy revenue without increasing prices – which is not advisable in the era of Amazon – alternative solutions are needed. That’s where self-checkout machines come in. In a traditional setup, you need one employee per till, but with self-serve machines, one staff member can monitor several tills at once. That’s not all. With manned checkouts, one staff member must be at or by the till even if there are no customers – waiting, in case someone shows up. With self-checkouts in place, there’s no need to waste your employees’ time. He or she can use the off-peak hours to receive products, restock the shelves, or advise customers. And if anyone needs to check out quickly, the machine is always active. Overcoming misconceptions If self-serve machines fit so well with today’s consumer and market trends, why has their uptake been so slow? In the past few years, many retailers have expressed misgivings on self-service technology. Some of the most common concerns include: High cost of hardware. High cost and low usability of software. Shrinkage control. Different factors, from scanning the wrong product, to missing an item, to intentional theft, can lead to lost inventory. It has been argued (although inconclusively) that shrinkage is more frequent in self-checkout lanes. Concerns over user acceptance. Some retailers worry that their customers won’t want to use machines, because they are too complicated, or simply because they’d rather have an employee serve them and take care of their needs. Although these have, indeed, been challenges in the past, those times are now behind us. 1. Slashed hardware costs Until a few years ago, self-checkout required special hardware, which meant a high upfront investment. Today, this cost can easily be minimized. For example, one of the most expensive pieces of the hardware is the cash-handling part. The question is, do you need to implement self-checkout machines that also accept cash? Ten years ago, six out of ten transactions were cash. Today it’s three in ten, and the number is still decreasing, Forbes reports. A self-checkout till that only accepts card payments, paired with manned tills that take all sorts of payments, can be a cost-effective solution.If you don’t sell grocery, and therefore don’t need scales at the till, you have even more options for saving on hardware. For example, some IKEA stores in the Nordic and Baltic countries set up effective, low-cost self-checkout registers using a standard computer screen, a barcode scanner and a receipt printer, and IKEA furniture. That’s all! No special hardware – and actually, no special software, which takes us to our next point. 2. No extra software expenses (if you select the right system) The checkout system used in these IKEA stores doesn’t have a specific interface. As a matter of fact, it is not designed for self-service. The customers check out using

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3 ways to lower food costs using your restaurant management system

Restaurant Management ERP /

In the low-margin restaurant industry, it is essential to consistently monitor food costs. As restaurants struggle with rising price of ingredients, bottlenecks in the food supply, and limited seating availability, it’s more important than ever for businesses to optimize ingredient buying and usage, and minimize waste. A good restaurant management system will help you keep track of raw ingredients, menu prices, and spillage and food waste, enabling you to determine where you can make improvements without decreasing quality. Here are three steps you can take. 1. Automate inventory monitoring In the food and beverage industry, food costs represent on average almost one third of total business expenses. A unified restaurant management system that connects sales, kitchen and inventory in real time within a single  platform will give you total visibility over usage of ingredients. And if it’s a truly unified platform like LS Central for restaurants, it will also enable you to link your purchasing to recipe management and to actual sales. Stock can then be automatically added to as new inventory is received from distributors, while preset amounts for each ingredient are automatically subtracted from the inventory count when dishes are prepared. Some software systems also enable you to adjust inventory on the fly, using mobile devices to remove from stock the jars that fell on the floor and broke, or the spoiled meat. All this data can then be organized and analyzed in your back office tools, giving you valuable insight into what might be affecting your bottom line and allowing you to take action. 2. Identify waste patterns and adjust The US restaurant industry alone wastes over $25 billion worth of food annually, according to a report by waste reduction group ReFED. This is a staggering amount of money being thrown into the garbage. The first step to managing food waste is to keep track of what you’re throwing away, in what quantities, and why. Use your restaurant management system to keep a regularly updated food waste log. Locate problem dishes, and establish achievable wastage goals for your staff. Your employees deal with food waste in both the dining room and the kitchen, so it is important that both kitchen and front-of-house staff are trained to minimize common mistakes and correctly report wastage. Implementing a culture of waste monitoring with your employees will encourage staff members to report more detailed waste data. It will also discourage employee theft by clarifying that all inventory, both raw and prepared, is regularly being accounted for. Once you track your food waste, it’s time to start looking for trends. Perhaps you’ve noticed a dish that consistently returns to the kitchen partially uneaten. Whether it’s the half-eaten pancake or the piles of untouched fries which you end up throwing out, your customers are telling you something about portion size. With a good restaurant management solution, you can easily adjust your recipes and optimize ingredients and quantities. If your dessert portions are too generous, you could consider getting twelve slices instead of ten from each cake, reducing the amount of whipped cream, or making your cupcakes slightly smaller. The difference might seem tiny at first, but by the end of the month those ounces will add up to savings. By keeping an eye on your waste and adjusting portions accordingly, you’ll produce profit-making dishes, and will have satisfied customers cleaning their plates.   3. Engineer your menu to perfection Menu engineering is the process of finding the perfect balance of popular low- and high-cost food items. It’s an ongoing practice that uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you make data-driven decisions that ensure meals are popular and profit-making. If you are using a restaurant management system that gives you real-time business information, you can keep track of your KPIs and see how well your business is performing relative to established targets at all times. Use the system to break down the data and see how many times a dish has been ordered, what it costs to produce, and what kind of profit it brings in. By tracking KPIs such as average contribution margins and food cost percentages, you can see how a dish compares to the average profit margin of similar menu items. Once you have this information, you need to decide which dishes should be kept in your menu, and which ones you should rather replace or discard. Do you have a menu item that is significantly below the average margin and sells poorly? That should probably go. Is there a popular dish that is slightly below the average margin? Check if it will stay popular even with slightly higher prices. Do you have a low-selling but high-profit dish? Promote it by giving it top center placement on the menu, and remind your servers to suggest it to guests when applicable. As you calibrate your menu for maximum profitability and customer satisfaction, you will also be adjusting your inventory. Why order bags of live clams when they require careful handling, have a short shelf life, and aren’t frequently ordered? Save yourself both time and money: remove them from your menu and your inventory.  Controlling food costs while providing consistently great meals is essential to your restaurant’s long-term profitability. While it used to require a time-consuming process of manual reporting and calculating, today technology can help you refine your processes and cut costs. Do you need more information on how a modern restaurant management solution can help you transform your business? Contact us

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Support & Implementation Plan for Business Central & D365

Business Central Implementation /

Introduction : Trident Help Desk Enterprise Solutions – ERP, CRM, BI, and Business Portals – yield business benefits only when consumed efficiently by the uses As businesses grow and scale up, these systems require adaption, enhancements, occasional technical support and the users require access to consultant’s time and mindshare.  This document provides the various standard support plans available to Trident customers. Being on one of the support plan brings to a customer the following advantages: Dedicated support & service delivery engineer. Dedicated Project Manager who’ll be working directly with your team Fast issue diagnosis and resolution recommendation Incident tracking in Jira Automatic response when a new incident is created Optimization of the existing processes Answering ‘How to’ ERP related questions Improving work practices through SOPs Automation of recurring tasks Release management & DevOps automation Additional services charged separately System Health Check & report System Performance review & optimization On-site visit for support & training Enhancement and Customization New Report Development New Module Implementation  Support Plans  Trident offers various Support Plans to customers to choose from – based on the needs of the customer. Following are our standard plans for customers who are Indian organizations, for their Indian operations. Plan A: Full Time Dedicated Resource A dedicated resource is allocated for the customer who remains available 100% to provide the needed support. The scope of this plan includes addressing both Support needs as well as handling Change Requests. If a certain change request requires more resources (over and above the 1 dedicated resource), prior approval is taken from the customer for the additional effort and cost. The customer will be invoiced for the additional effort spent immediately. Under this model a named resource is available to the customer. Minimum tenure for this plan is 1 month. Plan B: Shared Resource Under this plan the customer commits to a minimum 5 days of support need per month. The need may come up at any time during the month, in one or more instances. In case the customer does not utilize all of 5 days during a particular month, the balance days are carried forward to the next month, but lapse at the end of every quarter (March, June, September and December). The scope of work in this case includes both support and change requests. If the work identified requires more than the balance number of days for that month/ quarter, Trident informs the customer and takes prior approval for the additional effort and cost. This additional cost will be immediately invoiced. In this model the Trident consultant is shared with another Trident customer. Minimum tenure for this plan is 3 months.  Plan C: Time Package In this model the Customer commits to 200 hrs of support need over a period of 12 months. Response time would be 1 business days after logging of the issue. The support resource will remain a shared resource. The contract period will fall due for renewal either at the end of 12 months period or utilization of hours budgeted. Tenure for this plan is 12 months Scope of Support These Support Plans entitles the customer to avail support during normal business hours (Monday to Friday): 9.30 AM to 5.30 PM (excluding Trident/ public holidays). Support is predominantly from Trident offices and would be provided via e-mail/ Chat. Onsite support may be provided if the situation so demands – based on the merit of the issue – and on mutual agreement. Methodology For Shared Support and Time Package Support Activities for Level1, Level-2 and facilitation for Level-3 Service Request (SR) Logging SR Request Diagnosis Resolution Conceptualization and Solution Build Review and Testing User Acceptance and SR Closure Reporting and Continuous Improvement Trident Customer Support Portal All support plan customers are required to use the Trident Customer Support portal for logging requests, and tracking progress. A single customer login is created and authorized users from the customer can log the issues directly on the site. Both the user and the support team will get informed through email about the issue logged. Tracking of the issue is done through the portal. User can specify the priority and severity of the issue and can also attach screen shots. We can generate periodic reports to monitor the status of various issues.

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