By automating e-shops through an ERP system, you’ll help your business grow.
You know how it goes, a routine agenda involves a whole range of monotonous but important processes. However, many of the activities you carry out on a daily basis can be automated, which means simplifying life for yourself and your employees. But how to automate your e-shop? What will automation bring you besides financial and time savings?
ERP system will help automate business processes and improve user experience
These days, every customer requires maximum possible comfort when shopping in an e-shop, whether it’s online payment, high-quality information about the order or stock availability of goods. It’s clear that the pressure of customers for the most accurate information on an e-shop is constantly increasing.
Large e-shops set the level of user comfort quite high. If starting or growing e-shops want to cope with them, customer’s user experience cannot be any worse.
Connection of an e-shop to an ERP system allows for improvement of user experience and for automation of routine processes. This will buy the seller time for other important activities such as online marketing, expansion to other markets, improving the e-shop, etc. Employees in a warehouse can get time and order thanks to an ERP system. Thanks to this, admin employees can forget about manually rewriting data between different systems, which reduces the error rate as well as the number of complaints.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits that connecting an e-shop to an ERP system will bring.
Benefits of connecting an e-shop to an ERP system
Warehouse management
Accurate display of stock availability, which takes into account the overall stock status, order status, order plan from a supplier. Thanks to an ERP system, warehouse keepers do not have to “carry” the layout of the warehouse in their head. Thanks to the mobile PDA devices that are connected to an ERP system, they always know where each item is located. They have an overview of orders or lists of required goods, thanks to which they are able to pick up items from multiple orders during a “single trip”.
Let’s summarize it:
- exact stock availability,
- knowledge of the exact positions in the warehouse,
- accurate information on the status of an order,
- faster picking and dispatch of orders,
- time and financial savings.
E-shop operation
I’m sure you’re familiar with it. E-shop and warehouse systems don’t communicate with each other. Your employees rewrite orders manually, logically resulting in an error rate that leads to complaints and time losses.
This prevents the customer from receiving accurate information about the status of the order. The data is not centralized, it’s necessary to search for them.
Have you considered connecting your e-shop to an ERP system in which you have all the necessary data centralized to achieve:
- zero manual rewriting of orders,
- reduction of complaints,
- the customer is better informed about the status of their order.
Documentation and administration
Files full of paper documents, reports in Excel spreadsheets? Does this sound familiar to you? Forget about registering orders, stock items or invoices in a “paper system” and convert all important documents into electronic form. In combination with electronic validation and controlled documentation you will:
- speed up approval processes,
- provide online access to data for your employees,
- save a lot of time by automatically generating some of the documents,
- avoid errors when filling them in, duplicating and eventually rewriting.
All data in one place
Do you need information that’s, however, available from your colleague who is not at work? Tough luck? Surely not. One of the great benefits of an ERP system is that you can find all the information in one place and at the time you need it. Each employee has access to the information they need for their work.
And what data can you find in an ERP system? You can draw on information such as:
- customer database,
- overview of orders,
- overviews of warehouses, turnovers or complaints,
- invoices,
- as well as information about the payment morale of your customers and many others.
Data evaluation
Data in a central location is one thing. However, knowing how to evaluate it, navigate among it and read it is another thing. All the more so if you collect data from third-party systems. Data collection is the first step towards successful management of an e-shop, if you also evaluate and analyze it, that’s the way to win. It’s the ERP system that can help you with the analysis and evaluation of information. It can guard various indicators for you, so you can control:
- profitability,
- the amount of costs,
- statistics on the performance of business partners,
- an overview of the purchasing history of customers,
- stock status and turnover of items in stock,
- or an overview of complaints,
- but there’s more, of course.
The benefits of automation for your business
Let’s summarize it! Automating business processes can bring you a number of benefits, including:
- display of stock availability,
- high-quality information on the status of an order,
- centralization of data from different sources,
- access to an invoice, exchange of goods or establishment of a complaint,
- pricing policy that is up-to-date across all sales channels,
- aggregation of multiple sales channels or e-shop brands.
Money ERP – an information system that understands e-shops
The Money ERP information system, which you may know as Money S4 and Money S5, is designed for managing small and medium-sized companies, helping to simplify warehouse agenda, working with customers and selling goods in wholesale, retail or e-shop.
You can use a number of expansion modules to automate your business processes, thanks to which you can manage your e-shop directly from Money ERP. This will speed up order processing or you can automate parcel handling with a PDA reader.
The Money ERP modularity allows you to customize your solution for your business to get the features that will take your e-commerce business to the next level.
For the Money ERP information system, I can say that in recent years we have moved the possibilities of recording, processing and evaluating data necessary for two-way communication with an e-shop to a much higher level. Currently, thanks to the connection with the information system, we’re able to offer customers fuller options for automation and speeding up work, without unnecessary errors. And that’s what can be achieved thanks to the connection of an e-shop with an ERP system. Roman Kalamen, Business Manager Money ERP, Solitea Slovensko, a.s.
