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7 tips to deliver better online grocery shopping

Retail ERP Software, Retail POS Solution /

The boom of online grocery shopping has been a long time coming. In 2015, more than one third (37%) of shoppers in Asia-Pacific regularly shopped for food online, Nielsen reports. Although in the rest of the world online grocery shopping was less common, there was already a growing trend, which has only become more pronounced. According to projections by Deutsche Bank, online grocery shopping is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.2%, which is significant if compared with a 2.5% CAGR for total grocery sales. Supermarkets have had time to prepare for the shift to online, but not all of them have stayed on top of trends. When, due to necessity, consumers worldwide moved massively towards online shopping, some supermarkets found themselves suddenly out of the race. Today, the businesses who didn’t believe and invest in omni-channel are facing the harsh consequences of their decisions. Online shopping has been gaining ground quickly among all ages and geographies, and there is no reason to believe this popularity will fade in the upcoming months. This means there is no better time than today to invest in improving your e-commerce capabilities. Here are seven tips to get you started. 1. Focus on speed and ease of use Simplicity and usability of the platform should be your top goals: Make it easy for people to register, find the products they need, add items to the cart, review and edit the order and pay. Enable filtering per sub-groups of items to speed up search. Your customers would rather not have scroll through a hundred-item long list of “bread and pastries” to find the apricot-filled croissants they are looking for. Make sure you include all relevant product information. Feature high-quality pictures, and clearly label brand names, price, ingredients with nutritional value and allergens, and pack size. Include expiry dates wherever possible. If a shopper knows that the Greek yogurt lasts three more weeks, they might buy three packs instead of one. Support returning shoppers. Give customers the possibility to recreate previous orders quickly and activate shopping lists where people can add staples and family favorites. Allow registered customers to see their buying history and to share the basket with other family members. Ensure short page load times. If your site is too slow to load, buyers may abandon their cart without completing the purchase. 2. State the important information up front How annoyed will your online shopper be when he finds out that his postcode is not eligible for delivery, after he spent a full hour adding products to the cart? For retailers, it pays off to be clear and provide all needed information from the start. Buyers should be aware of shipping prices and times, delivery restrictions, geographical areas included in the service and special conditions before they have added a single item to their cart. When it’s time to check out, make sure that all the steps are clearly labelled, and that shoppers know what’s coming up in the process. Consider adding lines that clarify where the customer is at, such as “You can still modify your order in the next step” or “By clicking here, you confirm your order and accept to pay. You won’t be able to modify your order afterwards”. Consider adding a progress bar that shows the various steps (“Customer details” -> “Shipping” -> “Payment information” -> “Review order” -> “Complete and pay”). Once the order has been placed, include an “order completed” page where all the key information is summarized: items purchased, delivery and payment information, time of order, and what the customer should expect (an email? A call? A link to track the shipment?). 3. Think of the different platforms Today, more consumers access websites from mobiles than from computers. According to data from marketing site The Drum, last year 63% of traffic and 53% of sales on retailers’ eCommerce sites happened via mobile. As the preference for mobile shopping is only going to get more common, you should ensure that your website performs well on mobile devices. Here are some questions you should ask yourself: Is my e-commerce site responsive? Are the buttons big and easy to tap? Are the text fields large and easy to type into? Are pictures clear? Can people easily zoom in to see extra details? Is it easy to move through different images? Is all information visible on small screens, or do some lines disappear or end up off screen? Can customers easily move between items and categories? Is the payment process simple and easy to follow? Many consumers start a transaction on a device and continue it on another one. If when they resume the transaction they lose all the items they had already added to the cart, they may not be bothered to start over again – and you’ll lose that transaction. Enable saving the cart for logged in customers, so they can easily pick up transactions on different devices, at their pace and convenience. 4. Make it easy to navigate On your e-commerce site you can easily display a larger product selection than in your physical locations. If you decide to go for the “endless aisles” style, make sure you organize the selection so that customers can easily find what they need. Offer top-level categories that can be accessed from the top menu. Enable customers to filter and sort items by price, brand, group, review scores, etc. Make sure information is easy to skim through. Use bullet points and organize information consistently (first ingredients, then package size, then weight, then expiry date…) so users can find what they need at a glance. Make sure the “buy” button is clearly visible. Add a checkmark or confirmation text to clarify when an item has been added to the basket. Include a search function with predictive suggestions and auto corrects (“Did you mean…?”). Your customer may call “cilantro” what you call “coriander” on your site; you wouldn’t want her to leave without it just because the search gave no results. 5. Offer flexible delivery Offer several delivery options and time slots, and be specific with your delivery times. The best practice is to offer precise delivery windows, and allow people pick the one that best fits their schedule. The more precise you are, the more likely you are customers will decide to shop with you. Nielsen’s “Global Connected Commerce Report” advises offering 30-minute interval windows – provided you can

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Reduce supply chain disruptions with AI, IoT, and mixed reality

Supplychain management ERP /

Disruptions in global supply chains have significantly increased over the last decade, fueled by a myriad of triggers ranging from trade wars, demand surges from social marketing, natural disasters, and most recently, the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in the 2020 release wave 1 help organizations proactively transform every aspect of manufacturing and supply chain operations to reduce disruptions. These new and updated capabilities drive automation and reduce downtime using IoT and mixed reality, and provide the agility to re-plan production in real time to dynamically changing demand. In fact, the agility enabled by Supply Chain Management is currently being leveraged by a consortium of major UK industrial, technology, and engineering businesses from across the aerospace, automotive, and medical sectors that has come together to produce medical ventilators for the NHS. Reducing the risk of supply chain disruptions As the threat of disruptions increase, companies are pressured to ask if the supply chain is ready for the next event, pushing them to build a more resilient supply chain to ensure business continuity for them and their customers in the most cost-effective manner. More companies will start buffering for risks and move from a “Just-in time” mentality to a “Just-in case” mentality. Factories will need to transform rapidly to adapt to change, serving a wider range of products produced in smaller batches with lower set up time, faster throughput, and the ability to quickly respond to fluctuating demand and customer expectations. Companies are likely to move from single supplier to multi-supplier and single location to multi-location models for mission critical parts even if it is cost prohibitive in order to reduce the impact of supply chain disruptions. To reach this optimal state of agility and delivery speed, manufacturers need to adapt every aspect of the supply chain to enable tools, equipment, and people to become instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent—a state of persistent adaptive learning and optimization as more data is available to tighten links between manufacturers, suppliers, and customers. The latest release from Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enables customers to reach this optimal state by proactively transforming their manufacturing and supply chain with predictive insights and intelligence from AI, IoT, and mixed reality—across planning, production, inventory, warehouse, and transportation management—to maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability. Train workers faster with integrated mixed reality learning experiences Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is now integrated with Dynamics 365 Guides to help mainstream mixed reality for manufacturing. Companies can deliver a faster ROI by getting the workforce trained sooner with fewer trainers and with an interactive learning experience. Workforce efficiency can skyrocket with step-by-step instructions that guide employees to the tools and parts they need and how to use them in real work situations, available at a glance on a Microsoft HoloLens device that keeps their hands free to do the work. Dynamics 365 Guides can not only eliminate costly errors in production but also improve workforce safety. Companies can significantly reduce asset downtime by making asset maintenance skillset-agnostic and avoid costly waiting time for a specific expert to perform maintenance on an asset. The guides are extremely easy to author and do not require any coding. A guide can be authored by simply writing the step-by-step instructions on a PC followed by picking and placing the holographic parts and inbuilt icons on the machine where the work is happening. Introducing Dynamics 365 Guides for HoloLens 2 Dispatch the right resources at the right time Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is now integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service. Customers can significantly reduce downtime of geographically dispersed mission critical assets by automating field service operations so that the right resources—workforce, machines, parts, and tools—are available at the right place, at the right time, to proactively maintain them. Companies can improve the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of their geographically dispersed mission critical assets by performing predictive maintenance based on real-time performance data from IoT and field data from Dynamics 365 Field Service. Traditionally, disparate systems hinder the ability to accurately forecast demand for critical and expensive parts frequently used in both service and new production. Due to lack of forecasting for service demand, companies constantly take parts from production to fulfill the service demand, and vice versa, to deliver good customer service. This often creates a shortage for new production and significantly impacts on time delivery to new customers. As a result, the company is unable to deliver a delightful customer experience on both fronts. This integration will eliminate the need for disparate systems and significantly improve the forecast accuracy of these mission-critical parts due to real time tracking in the service supply chain. Seamlessly integrate IoT capabilities Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management now offers out-of-the-box IoT capabilities that leverage Microsoft Azure IoT Hub to connect signals from mission-critical assets with business transaction data. Manufacturers can improve uptime, throughput, and quality by proactively managing shop floor and equipment operations with a real-time view of their entire production and stock. This will significantly reduce costly downtime of business-critical equipment by performing predictive maintenance before disruptive failures occur. There is no coding required to implement these out-of-the-box IoT scenarios on your manufacturing floor today. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and IoT Intelligence customer spotlight with Majans Improve on-time delivery with real-time production planning The Planning Optimization Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enables companies to improve on-time delivery by performing production planning in real time, accounting for dynamically changing customer demand, material availability, and capacity constraints across multiple sites and warehouses. It also enables customers to improve inventory turns by right-sizing inventory levels based on dynamically changing customer demand and capacity constraints. This helps eliminate excess and reduces slow moving inventory. Planning Optimization Add-in for Retail and Distribution is available and Production planning is currently in preview.

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THE TOP 10 REASONS WHY SMBs SHOULD INVEST IN THE CLOUD

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services /

Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are lagging behind their enterprise counterparts when it comes to cloud adoption. With the new year (and new decade) fast underway, a recent Microsoft study showed that more than 96% of enterprises are using the cloud, compared to only 78% for SMBs. And while the use of cloud-based productivity apps like Office 365 has steadily grown among these smaller companies, their continued reliance on legacy software in key business applications such as ERP or accounting is impeding them from competing effectively with today’s top players. Given this situation, moving to the cloud should be an obvious priority for SMBs, but many myths and misconceptions still exist regarding the benefits of cloud technology. Below are the ten most crucial and game-changing benefits that SMBs have reported after investing in cloud solutions. 1 –  Greater profit and ROI Simply put, companies that move to the cloud make more money. And not by a small percentage, either. SMBs that invest in the cloud report up to 25% growth in revenue and up to 2x the profits over those who don’t. Embracing the cloud is simply a better path to faster growth. Additionally, cloud deployments provide a greater return on investment (ROI) than traditional on-premises software projects, especially in ERP and CRM. For example, Nucleus Research determined that companies that use Microsoft Dynamics 365 see a return of $16.97 for every $1 spent. That’s well above the average for on-premise ERP and CRM applications. 2 – Lower costs and CapEx Cloud subscription models eliminate up-front capital expenditures (CapEx) like the high cost of hardware and software licenses for projects like ERP software implementations. They also eliminate server and infrastructure setup, update, and maintenance fees—not to mention the resources saved on software upgrades, energy costs, and underutilized computing resources 3 – Unparalleled business flexibility Cloud software allows small businesses to remain always-on regardless of location. In today’s mobile and cloud-first world, the ability to be productive on any phone, tablet, or laptop provides the flexibility required to quickly adapt to changing information and business needs. This means more agile operations and happier customers 4 – Faster IT innovation The hassle and cost of routine IT maintenance tasks can be effectively offloaded to the cloud, enabling IT resources to focus on more strategic tasks like addressing problems, improving user experiences, fostering user adoption and best practices, and getting more value out of systems and processes 5 – Seamless, automatic software updates With cloud computing, all software updates are handled automatically, so critical systems always have the latest functionality and security features. This effectively ensures that all the benefits of a vendor’s ongoing R&D nvestments are transferred to their customer’s business, without that business having to dedicate any time or additional resources 6 – Cost-effective scalability SMBs need increased flexibility to grow and scale without hassle. With the cloud, as an SMB adds users, generates more transactions, or adds more data, services dynamically scale to manage the workload. This eliminates the need to pay for more hardware or maintenance to support business growth. As a bonus, SMBs only use the energy they need for their cloud apps. Since servers aren’t running idle waiting to be utilized, operations become more energy efficient, reducing the carbon footprint of the business. 7 – Improved collaboration and productivity Digital, cloud-based workspaces offer the opportunity to collaborate more effectively and remove data silos to enable greater employee productivity. Additionally, cloud-based office productivity suites and all-in-one business management solutions possess integration capabilities that simply can’t be matched by on-premises software. Cloud computing also allows teams to be productive, regardless of their location. This enables businesses to offer flexible working arrangements that create a healthier work/life balance and happier employees without sacrificing productivity. 8 – Seamless software integration Cloud applications are typically compatible with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that simplify integration, while automation tools like Microsoft Flow facilitate stitching them together without any custom code. Data and systems can be connected like never before, resulting in new levels of speed and efficiency. 9 – Superior security and data protection Small businesses are the most common victims of security breaches. In a recent study by ComScore, over 40% of small businesses were worried about data security before moving to the cloud. After making the switch, 94% of businesses reported security benefits they had been unable to achieve with their previous on-premises resources. Furthermore, physical hardware protection has always been a challenge for SMBs. Laptops get lost or stolen all the time. In addition to the replacement costs, there is the even greater cost of losing important or sensitive data. When storing and backing up data in the cloud, however, data is available and protected regardless of what happens to personal devices. 10 – Increased competitiveness Moving to the cloud gives SMBs access to enterprise-class technologies that were previously only available to the industry’s top players. With the cloud, any business can run on the exact same systems used by the largest, most sophisticated companies in the world, enabling them to innovate and act faster than competitors that manage on-premises legacy systems. In conclusion, with cloud software now available that is purpose-built for SMBs to run their sales, marketing, service, accounting, operations, supply chain, and project management activities—all from a single, connected solution infused with AI and advanced analytics—there’s never been a better time for small and medium-sized businesses to make the move to the cloud. Connect with our cloud expert for any query or requirement at –  info@tridentinfo.com

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New AI features connect and extend insights across the organization

Microsoft Dynamics CRM /

Today we’re unveiling new and enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across Dynamics 365 applications, as well as a new solution to help project-centric services organizations transform their operations. Joining more than 400 new and updated features in the 2020 wave 1 release, these new capabilities expand a fast-growing set of applications powered by AI-driven insights, and further propel our vision to empower every organization to unify data across the business and use it to power personalized customer experiences and processes. Personalize customer experiences with unified data and unmatched time to insight Customers expect personalized and consistent experiences across every touchpoint. Many organizations, however, struggle to modernize the customer experience, often due to disconnected systems and data siloes that can’t deliver the full picture of the customer’s journey across websites, purchases, service calls, and mobile apps. Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP), will help solve these issues. We’re introducing new first and third-party data connections to further enrich customer profiles that can be updated and activated in real-time, as well as enabling deeper insights with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Customer Insights will now uniquely enrich profiles with a combination of proprietary audience intelligence and 3rd party data sources such as demographics and interests, firmographics, market trends, and product and service usage data. Customers can also integrate Microsoft Forms Pro, the simple, powerful enterprise survey solution, to bring in the valuable voice of the customer across channels, allowing organizations to act on insights based on changing customer behavior and perception. All of this comes together to create a holistic, 360-degree view of a customer and to update those customer profiles and activities in real-time enabling organizations to know their customers and improve engagement. Customer Insights is built on a powerful and flexible platform that enables full extensibility. Organizations can derive deeper insights by using Azure Synapse Analytics, which combines customer data with enterprise and streaming data to improve data completeness, run high-speed analytical processing, and build custom machine learning models. This allows organizations to predict customer needs with insights and get guidance on the next best action to reduce churn and capitalize on revenue opportunities for the lifetime of a customer relationship. Organizations can act upon these insights in real-time across multiple destinations through prebuilt APIs to enable onsite clienteling, website personalization, dynamic marketing campaigns, and effective ad targeting. As part of the wave 1 release, we’re expanding the availability of Customer Insights to government cloud computing (GCC) environments helping to improve the citizen experiences essential to modern government. This means our government and public customers with higher compliance needs can now leverage Customer Insights to better understand and interact with citizens, empower employees, and transform cities at scale. Automate sales forecasting with predictive analytics In addition to expanded AI capabilities on our customer data platform, we’re extending the ability for sales professionals to forecast sales more accurately and introducing a new, unified engagement center for inside sales representatives. Available now for Dynamics 365 Sales and for Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, new manual and predictive forecasting capabilities empower sales organizations to have a better understanding of the pipeline, more accurately predict results, and gain visibility into future performance. The predictive forecasting capabilities enable the proactive decision-making needed to meet sales goals. Dynamics 365 does this by extracting patterns from customer relationship management (CRM) data, current and historical leads, won or lost opportunities, contacts, accounts, customer interactions such as emails and calls, and more data sources, and then projecting these patterns into the future. Best of all, anyone can access the insights, no data scientists or tech experts needed (a big change from some other forecasting systems). With a new engagement center designed to accelerate sales, we’re giving each inside seller a streamlined way to quickly triage, research, and engage new leads or opportunities. This provides them with their own prioritized work queue to take action on the highest priority leads and tasks based on built-in predictive scoring from Dynamics 365 Sales Insights and new, configurable sales cadences. The experience helps sellers stay in the context of Dynamics 365 and quickly move from one lead or opportunity to the next in an AI-prioritized work queue, without needing to switch views to take the next best action. Additional embedded AI capabilities offer sellers a path to a warm introduction, and guidance from the assistant. Transform the back office with AI-infused finance insights Not only are we expanding AI capabilities for customer and sales insights, we’re also bringing the power of AI to the finance department. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Insights, coming to preview in May, accelerates your digital transformation by bringing the power of AI into your finance processes. As organizations look to make decisions rapidly, reduce risk, and focus on strategic initiatives, it’s critical to free finance from repetitive, time consuming and low value daily activities. Leveraging the power of AI, Finance Insights enables you to not only quickly understand and act on your company’s cash position, but also to take proactive action to improve it. Menial tasks are automated or removed, the barrier of developing or hiring AI-expertise is bypassed, and you’re left with insights to move your business forward. Our continued investment in expanding AI capabilities across Dynamics 365 helps your organization accelerate digital transformation initiatives while empowering employees with insights to drive better business outcomes every day. Optimize project success and profitability with the ability to drive operational excellence across service-centric organizations How people work today has changed, as has the way organizations run their business operations. Companies across all industries are innovating business models to support project-centric service offerings. And while business optimization has gotten easier with the rise of mobile and cloud technology, organizations continue to stitch together systems and struggle with managing data across disparate systems. These data silos within project-centric businesses and teams are negatively impacting business model transformation, customer acquisition, employee retention, project delivery, and business profitability. Today we’re announcing a new Dynamics 365 application that connects cross-functional project teams, providing the visibility, collaboration, and insight needed to drive the success of project-centric organizations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, which will be generally available on October 1,

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Plan migration of physical servers using Azure Migrate

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services /

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Previously, Azure Migrate: Server Assessment only supported VMware and Hyper-V virtual machine assessments for migration to Azure. At Ignite 2019, we added physical server support for assessment features like Azure suitability analysis, migration cost planning, performance-based rightsizing, and application dependency analysis. You can now plan at-scale, assessing up to 35K physical servers in one Azure Migrate project. If you use VMware or Hyper-V as well, you can discover and assess both physical and virtual servers in the same project. You can create groups of servers, assess by group and refine the groups further using application dependency information. While this feature is in preview, the preview is covered by customer support and can be used for production workloads. Let us look at how the assessment helps you plan migration. Azure suitability analysis The assessment checks Azure support for each server discovered and determines whether the server can be migrated as-is to Azure. If incompatibilities are found, remediation guidance is automatically provided. You can customize your assessment by changing its properties, and recomputing the assessment. Among other customizations, you can choose a virtual machine series of your choice and specify the uptime of the workloads you will run in Azure. Cost estimation and sizing Assessment also provides detailed cost estimates. Performance-based rightsizing assessments can be used to optimize on cost; the performance data of your on-premise server is used to recommend a suitable Azure Virtual Machine and disk SKU. This helps to optimize on cost and right-size as you migrate servers that might be over-provisioned in your on-premise data center. You can apply subscription offers and Reserved Instance pricing on the cost estimates. Dependency analysis Once you have established cost estimates and migration readiness, you can plan your migration phases. Using the dependency analysis feature, you can understand which workloads are interdependent and need to be migrated together. This also helps ensure you do not leave critical elements behind on-premise. You can visualize the dependencies in a map or extract the dependency data in a tabular format. You can divide your servers into groups and refine the groups for migration by reviewing the dependencies. Assess your physical servers in four simple steps Create an Azure Migrate project and add the Server Assessment solution to the project. Set up the Azure Migrate appliance and start discovery of your server. To set up discovery, the server names or IP addresses are required. Each appliance supports discovery of 250 servers. You can set up more than one appliance if required. Once you have successfully set up discovery, create assessments and review the assessment reports. Use the application dependency analysis features to create and refine server groups to phase your migration. When you are ready to migrate the servers to Azure, you can use Server Migration to carry out the migration, get in touch with us our team will help you.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Reimagining Healthcare with Azure IoT

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services /

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Providers, payors, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences companies are leading the next wave of healthcare innovation by utilizing connected devices. From continuous patient monitoring, to optimizing operations for manufacturers and cold-chain supply tracking for the pharmaceutical industry, the healthcare industry has embraced IoT technology to improve patient outcomes and operations. In our latest IoT Signals for Healthcare research, we spoke with over 150 health organizations about the role that IoT will play in helping them deliver better health outcomes in the years to come. Across the ecosystem, 85 percent see IoT as “critical” to their success, with 78 percent planning to increase their investment in IoT technologies over the next few years. Real-time data from connected devices and sensors provides benefits across the health ecosystem, from manufacturers and pharmaceuticals to health providers and patients. For health providers, IoT unlocks efficiencies for clinical staff and equipment: Reduces human error. Ensures regulatory compliance when exchanging patient health data across systems. Coordinates the productivity of medical professionals across clinical facilities. For manufacturers, IoT creates new digital feedback loops connecting their employees, facilities, products, and end customers. Real-time data can help: Reduce costly downtime with predictive maintenance. Improve sustainable practices by reducing waste and ensuring worker safety. Contribute to improved product quality and quantity. For the pharmaceutical industry, IoT provides greater traceability for inventory along a supply chain: Improved visibility into environmental conditions. Reduced costly inventory spoilage. Increased control against theft or counterfeiting. For end patients, IoT can improve health outcomes with continuous patient monitoring: Reduces the need for unnecessary readmissions. Improves treatment success rates by providing continuous data to care professionals. Personalizes care based on patient needs. In this blog, we’ll cover how our portfolio can support different IoT solution needs for software developers, hardware developers, and healthcare customers. Building healthcare IoT solutions with Azure IoT As Microsoft and its global partners continue to build solutions that empower healthcare organizations around the world, a key question continues to face IoT decision makers: whether to build a solution from scratch or buy an existing solution that fits their needs. From ensuring device-to-cloud security with Azure Sphere to providing multiple approaches for device management and connectivity with Platform as a Service (PaaS) options or a managed app platform, Azure IoT provides the most comprehensive IoT and Edge product portfolio on the market, designed to meet the diverse needs of healthcare solution builders. Solution builders who want to invest their resources in designing, maintaining, and customizing IoT systems from the ground up can do so with our growing portfolio of IoT platform services, leveraging Azure IoT Hub as a starting point. While this approach may be tempting for many, often solution builders struggle when growing their pilot into a globally scalable IoT solution. This process introduces significant complexity to an IoT architecture, requiring expertise across cloud and device security, DevOps, compliance, and more. For this reason, many solution builders might be better suited for starting with a managed platform approach with Azure IoT Central. Using more than two dozen Azure services, Azure IoT Central is designed to continually evolve with the latest service updates and seamlessly accompany solution builders along their IoT journey from pilot to production. With predictable pricing, white labeling, healthcare-specific application templates, and extensibility, solution builders can focus their time on how their device insights can improve outcomes, instead of common infrastructure questions like ingesting device data or ensuring disaster recovery. New tools to accelerate building a healthcare IoT solution Over the past year, we’ve been working hard to create new tools to make IoT solution development easier for our healthcare partners and customers: Azure IoT Central app templates. Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) Connector for Azure. To help you put all of these tools together, we’ve also published a reference architecture diagram for continuous patient monitoring solutions. Continuous patient monitoring reference architecture IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure Interoperability continues to be a huge challenge and critical for most healthcare organizations looking to use healthcare data in innovative ways. Microsoft proudly announced the general availability of our own FHIR server offering, Azure API for FHIR, in October 2019. We are now further enriching the FHIR ecosystem with the IoMT FHIR Connector for Azure, a connector designed to ingest, transform, and store IoT protected health information (PHI) data in FHIR compatible format. Innovative healthcare companies share their IoT stories In addition to rich industry insights like those found in IoT Signals for Healthcare and our previously published stories from Stryker, Gojo, and Wipro, we are releasing two new case stories. They detail the decisions, trade-offs, processes, and results of top healthcare organizations investing in IoT solutions, as well as the healthcare solution builders supporting them. These case studies showcase different approaches to building an IoT solution, based on the unique needs of their business. Read more about how these companies are implementing and winning with their IoT investments. ThoughtWire and Schneider Electric leverage IoT for hospital operations Clinical environments are managed by traditionally disconnected systems (facility management, clinical operations, inventory management, and more), operated by entirely separate teams. This makes it difficult to holistically manage and optimize clinical operations. Schneider Electric, a global expert in facilities management, partnered with ThoughtWire, a specialist in operations management systems, to deliver an end-to-end solution for facilities and clinical operations management. The joint Smart Hospital solution uses Azure’s IoT platform to help hospitals and clinics reduce costs, minimize their carbon footprint, and promote better staff satisfaction, patient experiences and health outcomes. “We don’t just want to understand how the facility operates, we want to understand how patients and clinical staff interact with that infrastructure,” says Chris Roberts, Healthcare Solution Architect at Schneider Electric. “That includes everything to do with patient experience and patient safety. And when you talk about those things, the clinical world and the infrastructure world start to merge and connect. Working with ThoughtWire, we bridge the gap between those two worlds and drive performance improvements.” To learn more, read the case study here. Sensoria Health creates a new gold standard

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When do you know that your business needs a CRM software?

Uncategorized /

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Customer Relationship Management is a process of managing or organizing prospects throughout the sales life cycle. The more the advancement in serving the clients, the more will be the payment stream for the Company. Trident’s CRM software solutions happen to be one of the most effective and efficient CRM software that could easily cut overhead costs and give highlights which demonstrate helpful to different business firms. Many CRM software programs available have several features that can be used or restricted – so in effect a business can modify to make their own CRM software. However, utilizing CRM software gives various advantages to both organizations and customers and that is the reason each genuine business has implemented some of the other CRM applications. So who can opt for Trident’s CRM software? A simple response to that question would be “Any business with customers would utilize CRM“. However, in the real world, it is not just as simple as that. Choosing an appropriate CRM software solely depends upon the business process along with a range of profitable features. Below are the type of Businesses that could gain benefit from using Trident’s CRM software solutions. 1- The business that uses any form of Marketing:  For any business that uses marketing campaigns to promote, sell or advertise their products or services in the market through various communication mediums such as phone, email, etc. Reaching to customers in bulk within a short period as well as recording the response on the go makes it more effective to manage the marketing process. 2- A business that deals with B2B and B2C Sales: For any business that tends to cope up with the Customers to sell or cross-sell the products. Maintain relevant sales data such as documents, communication records, etc. Identify the process flow starting from Lead up to the deal gets closed. 3- A business that creates Quotations & Invoices:  Built-in invoicing module to track the quotations and invoices generated against an opportunity. Efficiency to merge the billing details into the document which can further be mailed to the customer right from the CRM software without any need to switch between the applications. 4 – A business that deals in Customer Service:  For any business that believes in increasing customer satisfaction by helping them in tracking as well as resolving the issues completely. Managing the cases within CRM as well as auto – escalations triggered on a timely basis not only guarantees better customer satisfaction but at the same helps the Management to track resource performance. 5- A business that wants to increase efficiency:  Well-organized business results in better output which can be ultimately tracked with the help of various Reports, Dashboards, etc. Well-improved or say the advance level of features incorporating in CRM with the latest release of versions has enhanced the CRM which has ultimately proved beneficial for Business growth. Thus using CRM software gives you numerous benefits to enrich both Business and Customer Relations by serving your customers better with stronger service and support. To know more about how can CRM software help you, you can check out our CRM software solution on https://tridentinfo.com/microsoft-dynamics-crm-software-solution/ and contact to our experts on https://tridentinfo.com/contact/.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Retail ERP and e-commerce integration dashboard managing inventory, orders, and online sales.

7 Reasons Your Retail Business Needs a Unified ERP and E-Commerce Integration Solution

Retail ERP Software /

Here is a scenario that will feel familiar to most retail operators: a customer visits your website, sees a product marked as available, drives to your store to buy it, and finds out the shelf is empty. Your website still shows it in stock. Nobody knows why. Or this one: a loyal customer who buys from you in-store every week places their first online order — and receives a “welcome, new customer” email. No recognition of their purchase history. No loyalty points applied. No sense that the business they have been giving you for two years means anything in the digital channel. These are not technology failures. They are integration failures — and they happen every day in retail businesses running separate, loosely connected systems for their physical stores and online channels. The solution is retail ERP and e-commerce integration — specifically, a retail-oriented integration solution designed from the ground up for the way retail businesses actually operate, rather than a generic middleware tool that treats your retail operation like any other business. This article covers the seven concrete reasons why retail-specific ERP and e-commerce integration delivers outcomes that generic solutions simply cannot match — and what to look for when evaluating your options. Why Separate Retail Systems Are Now a Competitive Liability Brick-and-mortar retail is not dead — but purely physical retail without a connected online presence is becoming increasingly rare. Today’s retail customer moves fluidly between channels. They discover products on social media, research them on your website, check availability through your app, visit your store to see them in person, and expect to complete the purchase on whichever channel is most convenient at that moment. Research consistently shows that 81% of consumers use mobile devices as part of their shopping research — and the majority of purchasing journeys now involve at least two channels before a transaction is completed. For retail businesses, every additional sales channel represents a potential revenue stream. But it also represents a new source of operational complexity — unless every channel shares the same data, the same inventory, the same customer records, and the same pricing. When they do not, the experience falls apart. And in a market where customers have endless alternatives, an experience that falls apart drives them to a competitor without a second thought. The Real Cost of Running Disconnected ERP and E-Commerce The cost of disconnected retail systems is distributed across every channel, every function, and every customer interaction — making it easy to underestimate until you try to measure it: Why Generic Integration Tools Fall Short for Retail Many businesses attempt to solve the integration challenge with general-purpose middleware tools — platforms designed to connect any two applications regardless of industry. Generic integration tools can technically connect a retail ERP with an e-commerce platform. The problem is that retail has specific operational requirements — BOPIS fulfilment logic, zip-code-based inventory routing, loyalty program data synchronization, multi-currency retail pricing rules — that generic tools are not built to handle natively. The result is months of expensive custom development to configure a generic tool for retail-specific scenarios, followed by ongoing maintenance overhead every time either connected system updates. A retail-specific integration solution — or better, a unified retail platform — delivers all of this functionality out of the box. 7 Reasons to Choose a Retail-Specific ERP and E-Commerce Integration Reason 1: Consistent Products and Pricing Across Every Sales Channel The most fundamental requirement of a unified retail operation is consistency — every channel showing the same products, the same prices, and the same promotions at the same time. When your product catalog, pricing structure, and promotional mechanics live in your ERP and distribute automatically to every connected channel, consistency is structural — it happens automatically rather than requiring manual synchronization. A retail-specific integration solution enables: For retailers managing hundreds or thousands of SKUs across multiple channels, centralized product management is not just a convenience — it is a necessity. Reason 2: True Omnichannel Fulfilment — Buy Anywhere, Deliver Anywhere The modern retail customer expects to complete their shopping journey on their own terms — and that means the fulfilment model needs to be as flexible as they are. Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS) is now a baseline expectation for omnichannel retailers — customers order online and collect from their preferred store, combining the convenience of online shopping with the immediacy of in-store collection. But executing BOPIS reliably requires real-time integration between your e-commerce platform, your ERP, and your in-store systems. A retail-specific integration solution enables the full range of omnichannel fulfilment scenarios: Each of these scenarios requires real-time data sharing between the e-commerce platform, the ERP, and store-level inventory — which only a retail-specific integration solution delivers reliably. Reason 3: Real-Time Inventory Visibility Across Every Location Inventory accuracy is the operational foundation on which everything else in omnichannel retail depends. Without accurate, real-time inventory data across every location, BOPIS fails, online availability is unreliable, and customer trust erodes. A retail-specific integration solution delivers inventory visibility that generic tools cannot: The business impact of real-time inventory accuracy extends beyond customer experience. Buyers make better purchasing decisions. Markdowns are more targeted. Overstock and out-of-stock situations are identified earlier and resolved faster. Reason 4: Unified Customer Data Across Digital and Physical Channels A customer who has shopped with you for five years should feel known — regardless of which channel they use. Their purchase history, preferences, loyalty status, and contact information should follow them seamlessly across every interaction with your brand. This only happens when your ERP and every connected channel share a single customer database — updated in real time by every transaction, regardless of where it occurs. A retail-specific integration solution delivers: Reason 5: A Single Loyalty Program That Works Everywhere Loyalty programs are one of the most powerful customer retention tools available to retailers — but only when they work seamlessly across every channel a customer uses. A loyalty program that earns points in-store but cannot redeem them online,

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Why Microsoft Azure became Most Secured & Reliable Cloud Platform

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services /

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In a recent survey, according to 28 percent of surveyed, Microsoft Azure was recognized as the most-used cloud platform, and the one most commonly to be bought or renewed— the largest percentage for any cloud computing provider. With results like this, it’s no surprise the number of businesses deeply invested in Azure keeps climbing. If you are searching for more details about Azure, including how your business could profit from it and make the best use of its services, you are in the correct place. This comprehensive guide covers the basics and beyond, from “What is Microsoft Azure?  How Microsoft Azure is different?? Whenever anyone questioned what Microsoft Azure is, the simplest explanation is this: Azure is a cloud computing system that can deliver everything that industry needs to digitally manage all or part of its computer processes — such as servers, storage, databases, networking, analytics and much more. The only available option to organizations has generally been to create and run the specific hardware required for computation, comprising servers, disk storage, and Ethernet switches. However now, businesses can use a public cloud computing platform like Azure that buys and manages all of the equipment in computation. This means businesses can “lease” hardware resources efficiently, as required. You can select and choose between Azure’s offerings to get the help you need to develop, deliver and manage software for your business processes. And since you’re leasing cloud infrastructure, you don’t have the expenses and shortfalls (like a dedicated IT department) involved with the actual infrastructure that goes with those operations. There are also many advantages above the cost and efficiency we will discuss further. Today, many businesses choose to use a mix of cloud services and on-premise data centres. Some even using different cloud services platforms, based on their needs and concerns. So, don’t worry if you’re interested in making a drastic change to your computer environment or think like you’re lifelong committing to a single business supplier. You’ll want to concentrate rather on deciding the feasibility of cloud technology in parallel to the requirements of your business. Often the simplest way to get the process started is to build a hybrid of the cloud with an established on-premises system.  Who makes use of Microsoft Azure adequately? Firms of all scales take interest in the use of the public cloud platform and many prefer Microsoft Azure. In practice, 85 percent of Fortune 500 businesses are using Azure. Azure appeals to several SMBs enterprises, too. One possible explanation behind this is that it enables SMBs to prevent the large expenditure of resources for facilities; it also eliminates the strain of improvements and maintenance, since they may not have readily available in-house experts to assist. And also because Azure makes it much easier to dynamically resize computing resources in moments, it gives greater versatility that enterprises simply would not have with a conventional on-premise cloud platform. Microsoft Azure Storage If you do cloud hosting, your information will not be processed on your servers anymore. Where exactly is it kept, then? Microsoft intends Azure users ‘ physical data backups, meaning it will be placed at one or more of Microsoft’s 100 + data centres across the world. You can generally determine the country you would like to deposit your information in. Generally speaking, it is suggested that your information be placed near where your customers are. The further away from your consumers, your information is stored, the more connectivity issues they will encounter. Azure will hold and run multiple duplicates of your information, using the process known replication, to ensure that your data is easily accessible. You can choose how to manage duplication — for instance, do you want two duplicates at the same area, or multiple versions processed across multiple locations? Security Standards of Microsoft Azure All major public cloud services, especially Microsoft Azure, have priority over security. With the latest expansion of its Azure Security Center, Microsoft has been particularly concentrated on this topic with a total focus. Azure Security Center is a monitoring tool that helps you to track security flaws and attacks to your Azure assets. This allows identify potentially malicious behavior throughout the hybrid cloud workloads using advanced analytics and suggests alternative remediation measures. Then you can assess those actions and take appropriate steps. Data Encryption at Rest is also provided by Azure, which is the cryptographic encoding of data when it persists. This uses an encryption algorithm for swift encryption and decryption of vast amounts of data. Now that Microsoft Azure has been implemented, we will shift on to the next phase — recognizing what Azure can do for you and your industry. There are various reasons, in my experience, why businesses end up making the move of having Microsoft Azure. Azure has so many functionalities that describing all of them in a single blog post will be practically impossible. Below are six functionalities most important to many enterprises. 1) Disaster Recovery  With Azure, your business gains a strong disaster recovery solution—one that also comes with a more affordable price tag than those associated with traditional computing environments. With Azure, you get access to: Various data storage data centers that enable you to distribute a cloud service to various places around the world. Azure Site Recovery, a service that helps guarantee that your critical business systems remain online by duplicating certain tasks from a host site to a secondary location during an interruption or disturbance. Azure Traffic Manager, which in case of an area-specific failure streamlines traffic routing to multiple locations (determined by the user) 3x Replication of information, ensuring all information you hold in Azure is replicated three stages, either to a single data center or to a second one. 2) Flexibility   The extra capacity to allow high volume tasks needs to be developed into the device. This is particularly true for an on-premise data center that involves purchasing and managing a lot of extra hardware year-round. You can instantly increase your industrial base with the cloud, and then reduce it easily when you’re finished. Besides, you

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Turn prospects into engaged customers with intelligent sales and marketing

Microsoft Dynamics CRM /

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] The selling landscape is undergoing fundamental changes, many of them driven by the effects of B2B customers’ experience as everyday consumers. Many retailers have created personalized, nearly immersive, online experiences for each customer. Consumers shopping for goods and services continually experience fresh and delightful interactions, from highly customized offers and recommendations to frictionless channels to 24/7 interactions. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales organisations are improving  their profit margins. The impact of B2C on B2B Today’s B2B buyers have high expectations, and those expectations will not be met if B2B buyers are accustomed to sophisticated consumer interactions in their personal lives. Executive B2B buyers are not impressed by marketing driven by large, relatively impersonal data analysis that leads to inconsistent and conflicting interactions or sales outreach that doesn’t cater specifically to their needs at the right time. The source of the problem may be largely invisible to the companies perpetuating this issue. Many organizations believe themselves to be customer-centric, while their buyers may not agree. That’s a significant disconnect. Clearly, B2B has much to learn from B2C companies. Customer experience – the rewards for getting it right Many B2C organizations have strategically embraced modern technologies like customer data platforms (CDP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to gain a 360-degree view of their customers and follow through on those insights to optimize customer engagement. The rewards for getting this engagement right are substantial. Many buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. In terms of the potential benefits a great experience can have on sales success, a McKinsey study reported that organizations can expect: 10-15 percent lower customer churn 20-40 percent increase in the win rate of offers Up to 50 percent lower service costs Take a new approach B2B companies must move away from their legacy approaches based on large, relatively impersonal data analysis and move to solutions that unify relationship data across the full customer lifecycle. That way, they can gain insights that help build credibility and trust with buyers. They can run multi-channel campaigns to increase sales-ready leads, create personal experiences, and use guided process and AI to anticipate and respond faster to customer needs. They can build the ongoing, high-quality relationships that are necessary for long-term success. Four principal goals Turning prospects into engaged customers is a process. In order to achieve these goals, organizations must focus on 4 key priorities: Nurture more demand Personalize buyer experiences Build relationships at scale Make insight-driven decisions Each of these drives results by using deep reservoirs of data in making technology feel more human. Nurture more demand Relying only on conventional, basic email marketing as the primary source of leads is simply not effective enough. In fact, the more focused and demanding the customer universe is, the more essential it is to gain deep insights into what those customers expect. Northrop & Johnson,  a leading global yacht brokerage, competes for multi-million dollar customers using technology its industry has been slow to adopt. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing has created a decided competitive advantage: Vital insights into their customer base have helped to drive a 70 percent increase in charter sales. In any industry, companies need to generate leads across multiple channels, nurture large numbers of leads while prioritizing each one, and use data-driven insights to deliver leads that are sales-ready. Nurturing more demand is critical to growth. Personalize buyer experiences It’s time to end friction, inconsistencies, and the “do you know who I am?” part of the customer experience. Companies can acquire a holistic view of buyers, predict buyer intent, and orchestrate a connected, personalized journey for customers. In an era where guests have more choices than ever for leisure and entertainment, Tivoli delights its guests by using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to stay one step ahead of expectations and transform the guest experience. With its deeper understanding of guests, it can add new chapters to its long tradition of imagination and innovation. Build relationships at scale Mutually beneficial relationships don’t simply happen with more data. Companies need to build credibility to establish and grow relationships with customers. Together, Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn enable the company to have increased information about, and impact on the sales relationships that are added to its sales pipeline, even as that pipeline experiences exponential growth month over month. Make insight-driven decisions Here’s where sales and marketing can truly align: utilizing data to uncover insights that lead to better-informed decisions throughout the sales process. This can improve performance, empower employees, and enable the company to gain increasingly effective strategic insights. With more than 1,500 pubs serving guests throughout the UK, Marston’s launched a business transition by bringing together guest data that was scattered across multiple systems into Dynamics 365. With their locations’ guest data now unified, Marston’s will gain a complete view of guests, which can be harnessed to generate customer satisfaction and strategic insights. This approach helps drive improved performance throughout the company, including the opportunity to empower employees – an often-overlooked aspect of a company’s success. Aligning sales and marketing: The intelligent way to succeed It’s possible to create exceptional experiences, drive more qualified leads, and increase revenue if an organization has the vision, process, and technology to harness all the data available. This requires high-level technology with well-defined business goals and sales and marketing applications fueled by keen intelligence. We have a compelling offering to accomplish just that with Microsoft Dynamics 365. Get in touch with our representative to request a demo for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales & Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing Blog Reference : https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2019/09/19/turn-prospects-into-engaged-customers-with-intelligent-sales-and-marketing/[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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