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Why organizational change projects fail and how to prevent implementation disaster

Retail ERP Software / Trident Information Systems

New IT installations often fail. At least that’s the widespread belief surrounding organizational change initiatives today. One frequently cited study from the 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation goes as far as saying that as many as 70% of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended. A more recent McKinsey survey of more than 1,500 executives who had undertaken a significant change effort in the past five years found that only 38% of respondents said “the transformation was ‘completely’ or ‘mostly’ successful at improving performance. After two decades of hearing about high failure rates related to change, it’s unsurprising that business leaders are wary of organizational change projects. Organizational psychologist Nick Tasler explained that these negative biases can create a toxic self-fulfilling prophecy. “When a change project falls a day behind schedule, if leaders and employees believe that successful change is an unlikely outcome, they will regard this momentary setback as the dead canary in the coalmine of their change initiative. (Never mind the fact that three other initiatives are still on time or ahead of schedule),” he wrote in an article for Harvard Business Review. “Suddenly, employees disengage en masse and then the change engine begins to sputter in both perception and reality.” Yes, change is hard, and complex IT implementation projects, particularly ERP installations, can be particularly challenging. But it doesn’t mean they are doomed to failure. So where do you start? How can you choose the right technology for your retail business, and ensure that the implementation project runs as smoothly as possible and you get the most from your investment? Here are some of the main causes for failure in any organizational change initiative, and how can you prevent them from happening: Mistake #1: Failure to plan Issue: An outdated legacy system is impacting business performance, and it needs replacing quickly. In their rush to get the project going, business management jump straight into the implementation without taking the time to develop a well thought-out organizational change management plan. Solution: Don’t be tempted to cut corners in your planning. Analyze your business, decide what should be prioritized, and understand all the different ways the project will impact your routines at every stage of the process. “Companies should start by analyzing their current and future requirements and processes,” says Gunnar Ingimundarson, Chief Consulting Officer at LS Retail. “How many software solutions are they currently using, and what are they used for? Map out the disparate solutions in the stack, alongside their dependencies and interconnections. The next step is to figure out where they can draw the biggest – or quickest – benefits. Is your POS system not generating the information you need on stock levels and product visibility? Or, are there integrations that repeatedly cause problems or break down? Do you experience missing data? Identify the area(s) where a new system would bring immediate value in terms of savings or returns. That’s where you should start, and that should determine your priorities.” Once the priorities are set, break the project down into manageable chunks, from pilot phase to initial implementation to company-wide rollout. Consider when it’s most appropriate to start each phase of the installation so you won’t place unnecessary strain on your business during busy times. Mistake #2: Key stakeholders aren’t onboard, or have unrealistic expectations Issue: Management want the new technology in place quickly and only focus on the end goals. They get frustrated by how long the project is taking and threaten to pull the plug. Or they wonder why the new software isn’t being adopted widely and successfully when they failed to communicate the changes to everybody in the business and get company-wide buy in. Solution: All stakeholders need to be committed to the project’s success right from the beginning, and to clearly understand the project’s scope and goals. “Internal resistance can kill even the best implementation project,” says Eric Miller, Regional Director for the Americas at LS Retail, building on his 13 years of experience in software implementations. “Get the buy-in from all stakeholders from the start, and make sure that the goals, objectives and expected end results of the project are clear and communicated from you to the stakeholders, and from the stakeholders to all the customer parties involved. It never pays off to sell a dream you can’t deliver on.” Bring together personnel from different departments to understand their requirements and what outcomes they hope to achieve from the implementation. Similarly, they need to understand how much time should be devoted to a project like this and ensure project teams are given sufficient time to carry out the work. Set realistic timeframes from the start, and ensure everyone knows exactly what’s required of them. Mistake #3: Unforeseen changes throw the project off track Issue: Even the best prepared projects encounter hurdles along the way, but if unforeseen issues arise and major milestones are missed, it can be tempting to throw in the towel and deem the entire project a failure. Solution: Know that when you’re dealing with a large-scale IT implementation, it’s hard to plan for every eventuality. Be willing to adapt and take a different approach if it ultimately means the project will be a success. “What was deemed to be the best approach initially may need to change – this might even happen after the pilot is completed. I have seen companies that went through multiple pilots before finding the right balance. It’s a learning process, and it’s never over,” says Miller. It’s worth learning everything you can from the pilot implementation. Instead of rushing on to roll out store #2, take a moment to see how the system is working and to identify any issues that you couldn’t have planned for in your testing environment. Success comes to those who take a considered approach. Mistake #4: Picking the wrong technology partner Issue: It may be tempting to go for the cheapest technology provider, but cheapest upfront may not necessarily deliver the long-term business value you hoped for. You quickly realize they can’t help you achieve your outcomes, because they lack drive,

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Reimagine productivity with Microsoft Dynamics 365

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Transform business process automation and people productivity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Cloud

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Advancing Azure service quality with artificial intelligence: AIOps

We are going to share our vision on the importance of infusing AI into our cloud platform and DevOps process. Gartner referred to something similar as AIOps (pronounced “AI Ops”) and this has become the common term that we use internally, albeit with a larger scope. Today’s post is just the start, as we intend to provide regular updates to share our adoption stories of using AI technologies to support how we build and operate Azure at scale. Why AIOps? There are two unique characteristics of cloud services: The ever-increasing scale and complexity of the cloud platform and systems The ever-changing needs of customers, partners, and their workloads To build and operate reliable cloud services during this constant state of flux, and to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible, our cloud engineers (including thousands of Azure developers, operations engineers, customer support engineers, and program managers) heavily rely on data to make decisions and take actions. Furthermore, many of these decisions and actions need to be executed automatically as an integral part of our cloud services or our DevOps processes. Streamlining the path from data to decisions to actions involves identifying patterns in the data, reasoning, and making predictions based on historical data, then recommending or even taking actions based on the insights derived from all that underlying data. Figure 1. Infusing AI into cloud platform and DevOps. The AIOps vision AIOps has started to transform the cloud business by improving service quality and customer experience at scale while boosting engineers’ productivity with intelligent tools, driving continuous cost optimization, and ultimately improving the reliability, performance, and efficiency of the platform itself. When we invest in advancing AIOps and related technologies, we see this ultimately provides value in several ways: Higher service quality and efficiency: Cloud services will have built-in capabilities of self-monitoring, self-adapting, and self-healing, all with minimal human intervention. Platform-level automation powered by such intelligence will improve service quality (including reliability, and availability, and performance), and service efficiency to deliver the best possible customer experience. Higher DevOps productivity: With the automation power of AI and ML, engineers are released from the toil of investigating repeated issues, manually operating and supporting their services, and can instead focus on solving new problems, building new functionality, and work that more directly impacts the customer and partner experience. In practice, AIOps empowers developers and engineers with insights to avoid looking at raw data, thereby improving engineer productivity. Higher customer satisfaction: AIOps solutions play a critical role in enabling customers to use, maintain, and troubleshoot their workloads on top of our cloud services as easily as possible. We endeavor to use AIOps to understand customer needs better, in some cases to identify potential pain points and proactively reach out as needed. Data-driven insights into customer workload behavior could flag when Microsoft or the customer needs to take action to prevent issues or apply workarounds. Ultimately, the goal is to improve satisfaction by quickly identifying, mitigating, and fixing issues. Figure 2. AI for Cloud: AIOps and AI-Serving Platform. AIOps Moving beyond our vision, we wanted to start by briefly summarizing our general methodology for building AIOps solutions. A solution in this space always starts with data—measurements of systems, customers, and processes—as the key of any AIOps solution is distilling insights about system behavior, customer behaviors, and DevOps artifacts and processes. The insights could include identifying a problem that is happening now (detect), why it’s happening (diagnose), what will happen in the future (predict), and how to improve (optimize, adjust, and mitigate). Such insights should always be associated with business metrics—customer satisfaction, system quality, and DevOps productivity—and drive actions in line with prioritization determined by the business impact. The actions will also be fed back into the system and process. This feedback could be fully automated (infused into the system) or with humans in the loop (infused into the DevOps process). This overall methodology guided us to build AIOps solutions in three pillars. Figure 3. AIOps methodologies: Data, insights, and actions. AI for systems Today, we’re introducing several AIOps solutions that are already in use and supporting Azure behind the scenes. The goal is to automate system management to reduce human intervention. As a result, this helps to reduce operational costs, improve system efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction. These solutions have already contributed significantly to the Azure platform availability improvements, especially for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs). AIOps solutions contributed in several ways including protecting customers’ workload from host failures through hardware failure prediction and proactive actions like live migration and Project Tardigrade and pre-provisioning VMs to shorten VM creation time. Of course, engineering improvements and ongoing system innovation also play important roles in the continuous improvement of platform reliability. Hardware Failure Prediction is to protect cloud customers from interruptions caused by hardware failures. Microsoft Research and Azure have built a disk failure prediction solution for Azure Compute, triggering the live migration of customer VMs from predicted-to-fail nodes to healthy nodes. We also expanded the prediction to other types of hardware issues including memory and networking router failures. This enables us to perform predictive maintenance for better availability. Pre-Provisioning Service in Azure brings VM deployment reliability and latency benefits by creating pre-provisioned VMs. Pre-provisioned VMs are pre-created and partially configured VMs ahead of customer requests for VMs. As we described in the IJCAI 2020 publication, As we described in the AAAI-20 keynote mentioned above, the Pre-Provisioning Service leverages a prediction engine to predict VM configurations and the number of VMs per configuration to pre-create. This prediction engine applies dynamic models that are trained based on historical and current deployment behaviors and predicts future deployments. Pre-Provisioning Service uses this prediction to create and manage VM pools per VM configuration. Pre-Provisioning Service resizes the pool of VMs by destroying or adding VMs as prescribed by the latest predictions. Once a VM matching the customer’s request is identified, the VM is assigned from the pre-created pool to the customer’s subscription. AI for DevOps AI can boost engineering productivity and help in shipping

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Is your business ready to take supply chain management to the next level?

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When you lack deep visibility and insight into your supply chain, you leave money on the table It turns out what you don’t know as a manufacturer can and will hurt you. For too long, manufacturers have settled for siloed and inconsistent information, as well as manual processes, to understand and manage their supply chain. Why? Because for a long time, these systems were good enough to keep production going. But plenty of manufacturers don’t want to settle for good enough. IDC predicts that by 2019, 50% of manufacturing supply chains will have benefited from digital transformation, and the remainder will be held back by outdated business models or functional structures. Smart manufacturers understand that supply chain transformation is necessary. They are connecting assets across their factories, gaining visibility into their supply chain, and acting on insights from increased visibility to address inefficiency, as well as increase customer satisfaction and margins. Don’t accept operational inefficiencies as a limit on your business Supply chain management is complex, so doing it right requires a solution that simplifies and consolidates disparate information, while retaining flexibility. Data from the sales process, suppliers, order fulfillment, product performance, and customer service all matter for a full understanding of the supply chain. The core tools for accomplishing this fall into three categories: IoT-enabled visibility and services, powerful analytics, and cloud-delivered data visualizations. Like many aspects of manufacturing, IoT is the starting point. The best way to lower production costs is by using a single IoT-friendly platform to integrate back and front office processes. Using IoT-based modeling to create digital twins, manufacturers can understand in real-time the amount of wear and tear on parts and adjust designs in response. This insight can help identify simple inefficiencies like sourcing a part from the company that’s always supplied it, rather than buying a similarly-performing part at a lower cost from another supplier. Powerful analytics is the next step in transforming your supply chain. A truly intelligent system for supply chain management dynamically adjusts distribution, as well as production, to accelerate the speed of delivery. By using built-in analytics and machine learning, public data like weather conditions can be used to create richer, more accurate schedules and delivery forecasts. On top of that, opportunities to consolidate or expedite shipments can be automatically identified using artificial intelligence—passing lower shipping and order fulfillment costs on to customers. Finally, consolidating all this information won’t completely optimize your supply chain without the ability to easily visualize and manage it. That’s why a real-time and mobile-delivered view is so crucial. Understanding how to solve problems is hard enough; there’s no need to complicate it further by using different systems to identify where problems are occurring. Decision makers on the factory floor or in global headquarters need instant access to relevant information, and the collaborative power to communicate with or work alongside employees anywhere in the world. These investments in operations put manufacturers in position to embrace new technology and adjust to whatever business challenges they may be facing. Get the tools to transform with Microsoft Dynamics 365 The power of a supply chain management and operations platform that combines all these capabilities at cloud speed and scale is obvious. Companies positioned to digitally transform their supply chains will see accelerated time to market and reduced cost to enter new markets or scale new lines of business. Microsoft supports flexibility in deployment, enabling you to leverage existing investments while expanding with either a cloud or a hybrid model that includes both on-prem and cloud systems. That can shorten deployment from months to days and ensure security and analytics capabilities are consistent across every location and tuned appropriately for every team. Microsoft Dynamics 365 ends the artificial separation of ERP and CRM and makes it easy for employees to collaborate and even role-switch to engage customers or address supply chain issues. Only Dynamics 365 unites the front office and the back office with a single end-to-end system for managing every aspect of your business, all backed by industry-leading enterprise cloud. That means manufacturers can develop at the pace and scale that’s right for them, while taking advantage of current investments such as existing productivity and technology stacks. With Microsoft, consistent development practices and R&D investments combine to offer manufacturers rich analytics, embedded intelligence, partner-created applications, and the ability to collaborate worldwide.

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How Manufacturing Industry Transformed using Microsoft Dynamics 365

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The future of manufacturing will be defined by the quality of investments companies are making today In the not too distant past, efforts in manufacturing to optimize productivity and increase customer satisfaction were viewed as separate endeavors. Today, the convergence of physical and digital trends is disrupting these kinds of assumptions. Manufacturers today care about integrated digital and physical systems, improved visibility, increased efficiency, additional flexibility, and lower costs. They want to connect equipment and factories, leveraging data from the factory floor to the customer call center to improve every aspect of their operations. But this is just the beginning. Digitization is fundamentally changing the way manufacturers do business, enabling a customer-centric approach while optimizing operations. Digitally empowered manufacturers engage customers throughout the product lifecycle from design to field service. They sell value-add services to complement the product sales, opening new revenue streams and strengthening their customer relationships. And they are revolutionizing delivery of these differentiated services, using technology like augmented reality to combine the eyes of a technician in the field with the insights of an expert back at headquarters. Capitalizing on these trends isn’t limited to large, well-resourced manufacturers. Across all kinds of manufacturing operations, the opportunity to digitize and transform your business has never been more accessible. Imagine your business transformed The Microsoft vision for supporting digital manufacturing embraces the seismic shifts in the industry today. We’ve created solutions that provide a unified and flexible approach across front office and production floor processes. Our approach enables transformation in six ways: Optimize supply chain operations through better visibility and collaboration By collecting, integrating, and visualizing global supply chain data worldwide, manufacturers gain better visibility into their operations from production to sales. For example, one of the world’s largest industrial automation firms found that by automating the collection and analysis of data from remote installations across the petroleum supply chain, they strengthened their competitive advantage with a faster time to market. Improved access to supply chain data is also the basis for better collaboration across production, supply, service, and sales. Streamline the management of assets, products, and production With a consolidated view that unifies process oversight and provides real-time insight, manufacturers can institutionalize efficiency gains and use connected devices to monitor and resolve issues remotely. One leading manufacturer of industrial robots enabled 24-hour continuous uptime using this approach. The additional insights into production and customer usage also allow manufacturers to provide value-added services like ongoing monitoring and proactive support. Engage customers in powerful new ways To deliver personalized and contextual engagement across any channel, manufacturers must provide customers with more visibility and build trust through fast and convenient responses. This engagement approach is built on a combination of predictive analytics, the ability to deliver value-added services at scale, and guided or self-directed service that’s relevant to customer needs. With the implementation of a connected platform for sales through service, a leading home technology manufacturer not only solved potential problems remotely before customers ever felt the impact, but provided custom differentiated offerings based on unique customer usage and purchasing history. Transform service centers into profit centers Thanks to the ever-decreasing cost of IoT sensors, sophisticated mobile devices, and cloud-based data aggregation, manufacturers can improve service quality and margins by offering remote monitoring and proactive maintenance services that supplement break/fix support. By more intelligently coordinating technicians equipped with mobile and virtual reality tools, companies can leverage existing expertise and minimize costly engagements. A leading tire service and manufacturing company found that by combining customer records, technician availability, and back-end inventory in a single mobile-friendly system, it could provide a seamless user experience as well as improve its service delivery. understand their business more deeply, from customer usage through supply chain sourcing and production. With IoT-enabled parts, assets, and products, manufacturers can gain the insights needed to innovate. Data from connected products and equipment can empower developers, engineers, and technicians to collaborate. For example, teams can identify overengineered or faulty components and track product usage in the field to improve future designs. When a leading information and communication technology company implemented remote monitoring, they decreased time to production as well as accelerated the cycle of innovation using a data-driven approach. Empower employees to work more effectively When a company can provide 360-degree views of customer assets and work order history, technicians are empowered by a better understanding of not only the job in front of them, but of other similar and successful field service engagements. This goes hand in hand with empowering service agents to provide instant feedback, using machine learning to find and follow similar cases for successful troubleshooting, and scheduling a visit or evaluation. A leading auto manufacturer wanted to save money by unifying their siloed customer service and customer engagement while providing employees with better tools to understand customer sentiment. To accomplish this, it implemented a system to connect production and project management with their customer relationship management systems in order to deliver personalized service and recommendations to their customers. Introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 For manufacturers, Microsoft Dynamics 365 ends the artificial divide between CRM and ERP systems and supplements necessary capabilities with rich analytics, embedded intelligence, and the convenience people expect from consumer apps on their phone or tablet. Dynamics 365 unites the front office and the back office with a single end-to-end system for managing every aspect of your business, at the pace and scale that’s right for you. Digital transformation isn’t accomplished overnight and leveraging current investments is a key component of any successful approach. With Microsoft, you can optimize across all your processes while laying the foundation for connecting advanced technology in the future. Blog reference: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2017/05/30/manufacturing-transformed-microsoft-dynamics-365

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Whitepaper: The business owner’s guide for replacing accounting software

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Replacing your accounting software is easier and more affordable than you may think. Use this guide to learn about the benefits of a modern technology platform, better understand the advantages of a cloud-based solution, and know what questions to ask when evaluating your options.

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Whitepaper : Four technology trends helping businesses thrive in a digital world

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4 ways technology can help businesses thrive in a digital world. The good news is that the tools that help businesses capitalize on this digital transformation are more accessible than ever before. The cloud is removing barriers like high up-front costs, ongoing maintenance, and IT dependency.

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Maintain business continuity with Dynamics 365 Field Service

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In today’s dynamic business climate, field service teams are still expected to maintain infrastructure and customer equipment, often with fewer onsite technicians and limited face-to-face interaction with customers. That means adjusting one’s field service model to continue providing proactive service—sending in the right people and tools at the right time—while being prepared with the processes and technology to do more with less from the field. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist can help organizations provide proactive service at the speed, volume, and quality customers expect, while reducing latency and cost burdens of onsite service. To drive these key business outcomes, we’ve invested in the following areas for the 2020 release wave 1: Increasing technician success by enabling field service inspections, technician time tracking capabilities, and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist AI-infused insights to improve incident categorization and connected IoT capabilities Enhanced proactive service delivery with tighter integration between Field Service and Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Intune for Field Service Mobile Optimized resource scheduling with the new, next generation scheduling board Increasing technician success We know that for onsite visits, enabling technicians to achieve a first-time fix is the ultimate goal, while also leveraging the technician’s valuable onsite time to drive increased proactive customer service. To that end, we’ve added the following capabilities: Now in preview, the new Inspections feature allows technicians to analyze and capture essential data while performing Field Service inspections, which can better assure quality, safety, and end-customer visibility. Enhanced the technician’s ability to track their time in both automated and manual ways, directly within Field Service rather than in separate applications. In addition to the ability to track time, we’ve enhanced it with time capture precision to ensure the most granular data is available to derive the insights that can help to ensure better scheduling and utilization. We have updated Dynamics 365 Remote Assist with enhanced data capture and sharing. When technicians use a Microsoft HoloLens headset when performing inspections or fixing equipment, they can record and share the session with experts located elsewhere, enhancing real-time team collaboration with the ability to review onsite work, helping to improve quality of service and first-time fix rates. These new Field Service and Remote Assist features help ensure technician success and optimize resource utilization, creating confidence in an uncertain business landscape. AI-infused insights We’re enhancing Field Service with AI to help technicians properly categorize incidents, which leads to improved business metrics like parts inventory and availability, technician scheduling, and increased first-time fix rates—driving down the overall cost of service for customers. Device telemetry and service maintenance data helps to make intelligent decisions around dispatching technicians, however analyzing and prioritizing IoT alerts can be challenging. To address this, we’ve enhanced IoT alerting in several ways to increase proactive service delivery. Using AI-generated suggestions (preview) based on the past service history data, organizations can easily identify which IoT alerts are most important and can drive the biggest impact to increased proactive service delivery through connected field service. We’ve also added time series insights and a summary of the measures for the alert making it quick and easy to view and analyze the service history and take action. Enhancing proactive service delivery Improving proactive service with remote delivery helps to increase customer satisfaction and reduce overall service costs. We’re enhancing proactive service delivery with tighter integration between Field Service and several enabling Microsoft technologies, including: Integration with Power Automate (preview) to expand the automation workflow capabilities to the massive library of connectors and robust logic building user experience. Aligning asset management capabilities and integration with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to complete the field service workflow scenarios, end to end, all in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Intune for Field Service Mobile to enable IT organizations to easily manage the Field Service Mobile app. Optimizing resource scheduling Resource Scheduling Optimization (RSO) automatically schedules jobs to the people, equipment, and facilities best equipped to complete them. Updates include: new, next generation schedule board (preview) and resource management features to help service teams more quickly and efficiently manage technicians at all stages of the service journey. The new schedule board has a modern user experience with greatly improved performance and a fluid drag and drop functionality. A simplified and improved experience for managing technician work hours and time off, including a Microsoft Power Apps control that lets customers modify technician time through even more simplified app experiences. In addition, we’ve added requirement dependencies to schedule work orders in sequence increasing first-time fix rates and technician and customer satisfaction. A new dashboard for managers and dispatchers to surface insights that can help them monitor utilization and identify optimizations for time utilization. Delivering more agile, simplified, and proactive field service Siemens Smart Infrastructure intelligently connects energy systems, buildings, and industries to adapt and evolve the way people live and work, helping companies make buildings safe, comfortable, energy-efficient, and economical. Siemens is deploying Dynamics 365 Field Service to support more than 12,000 employees—including 7,500 service technicians—with the tools, processes, and agility they need to quickly and proactively handle customer issues and ensure smooth communication. Now, by taking advantage of capabilities such as proactive service delivery, resource scheduling, AI-infused insights, and more, Siemens is empowered to be more nimble and able to react to disruptive changes while continuing to provide high quality service to their customers. To learn more about the Siemens journey, read the customer story. Like Siemens, Microsoft can help you and your service teams continue to meet ongoing demand for service despite new challenges. Explore the resources below to learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist help ensure your ongoing success so you and your team continue to flourish long after this crisis. You can contact Trident Information Systems for Demo of Dynamics 365 for Fields Services Blog Source : https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2020/04/28/maintain-business-continuity-with-dynamics-365-field-service/

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7 tips to deliver better online grocery shopping

Retail ERP Software, Retail POS Solution / Trident Information Systems

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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THE TOP 10 REASONS WHY SMBs SHOULD INVEST IN THE CLOUD

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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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