Why NOW is the best time to start searching for a new OMS/WMS/CRM platform

Multichannel merchants have more than a dozen fully integrated OMS/WMS/CRM third-party solutions to choose from (actually, down from three dozen in the 1990s). These are, by definition, complex systems that require careful specification and painstaking implementation to be fully functional and provide maximum ROI to the companies using them.

Implementation can take anywhere from six to eighteen months, with twelve months a practical goal if managed properly. Before running through a high-level pro forma schedule, let's focus on the "managed properly" aspect of the process.

There are three basic elements to such management:

1) The merchant must have a designated Selection and Implementation Team whose top priority is choosing and implementing the new system. The team should include a representative from purchasing, sales & marketing, operations/fulfillment, IT, eCommerce, and order entry/customer service. And it needs a Team Leader, who can be from any department or C-Level position, so long as they have a demonstrated track record for project management. This will be one of the most important and critical projects the company will be undertaking for quite some time, and cannot be sidetracked, neglected, or mismanaged. Everything is riding on its success.

Note, however, that none of the team members, including the Leader, will be working on the implementation project as a full-time commitment. Some days and weeks it will be full time and more, but in general it will require about eight to twelve hours per week, some in contact with the system vendor, others in meetings of the entire team or designated members, and some in administrative or follow-up tasks.

2) The Selection and Implementation Team must have an Implementation Plan. This must be done in close collaboration with the third-party vendors, which include at minimum the OMS/WMS/CRM provider, the eCommerce provider (if separate from the OMS vendor), the company handling sales tax calculation, and the company doing payment processing. There are some OMS solution providers who offer all of these services in one integrated package, but even then, there will be integration with other systems in the merchant's IT stack, including accounting, product management, merchandise forecasting, supply chain management, and so on.

And last but far from least, there will be data conversion, which can be a snake pit of problems and challenges. In general, since systems manage order data so differently from one another, merchants should keep the old system up and running for at least six months, and use it for looking up orders that were created on it. Customer and product look-ups and management, on the other hand, will be done on the new platform from Day One (see "Go Live" in the Pro Forma Schedule below).

3) No scope creep! Once the system has been selected, based on careful evaluation of how well it meets the defined criteria and functional specification, the functionality of the system should be "closed," with no "by the way" or "if you're doing that, can you do this?" Scope creep is death by a thousand cuts, and should be avoided completely!

PRO FORMA SCHEDULE

The following is a generic schedule for the entire systems specification, selection, and implementation process that can be adapted to suit any company's specific situation:

Month 1: Preparation
The company needs to determine first of all if a new system is really required. I have seen all too many instances where an initial planning group gets together to discuss general system needs, and discovers to its shock and delight that the current system can actually handle everyone's top priorities (and often more) but users were unaware because those functions had never been implemented or "turned on."

During the prep month team members should compile a list of system vendors to be included for consideration for the new system. In general, there are three "buckets" for candidate solutions. A) Systems that focus on one or two aspects of the OMS/WMS/CRM process, B) Systems that will meet most requirements, but from vendors who have a high-cost business model based on large sales teams and expensive database platforms, and C) "The Goldilocks" systems that manage all OMS/WMS/CRM functions and cost in the $50,000 to $500,000 range (for, let's say, 30 users; will be in seven figures for 50 user or more). The latter are specifically designed for multi-channel merchants.

Finally, in the Prep month the company needs to form the System Selection and Implementation Team and make sure everyone understands the process. The Team needs to determine the Team Leader, and contact any potential consultants that can assist with this process.

Month 2: Request for Proposal
A Request for Proposal, or RFP, can be an extremely detailed document covering a broad range of features and functions, or it can be a much more focused summary of system needs and requirements. If the latter, the top ten requirements should be described in sufficient detail to assure that system providers/vendors can ascertain the degree to which they can support them.

Month 3: Vendor Responses
The system vendors who have received the RFP will submit their responses. Some may request an extra few weeks to complete their replies, but in general, we can assign one month for this.

Month 4: Proposal Reviews
Some vendors will be eliminated based on system cost (way out of line with the trend) or lack of critical functionality. Those who remain based on review of their proposals should be contacted to do remote Web demos of about two hours or so. From this group (perhaps three or four vendors), two "finalist" candidates should be invited to do full-day, on-site demos at your facility.

Month 5: Vendor Selection
Based on the on-site demos (and review of any available system documentation), the Selection Team will make a final vendor selection, which should be based not only on "functionality" but also on how well you feel your organization will fit with the vendor's existing user "family." The companies using the system should be somewhat similar to yours in size, product range, and company culture. If the vendor personnel and/or the system users aren't compatible with your corporate style, the likelihood of long-term system success is greatly diminished.

Month 6: System Configuration Planning
Once selected, the vendor should meet with your Team and determine exactly which features and functions are the highest priority and focus on any configuration or customization that might be required to provide them. Even if you have a chosen a cloud solution with few if any options for modification, there will always be configuration to take care of, and this is the time for nailing it down in detail.

Month 7: Configuration Review/Data Conversion
The Team should review in minute detail all system configurations, and specify in detail how existing customer and product data should be converted for management on the new platform.

Months 8 and 9: Execute Configuration and Data Conversion; User Training
Training Users should be done in two phases. A week-long overview of the entire system for all users, followed by a week of training specifically for each user group on the features and functions they will be most focused on going forward.

Month 10: Go Live!
With the new system fully configured and populated with legacy customer and SKU data, and users ready to use the system, you are ready to cut over to the new system. I recommend doing this on a Wednesday, so that on the previous two days users can do a final "recap" or "review" of the new functionality (and often new terminology, as well), and can use Thursday and Friday to "clean up" any glaring or show-stopper issues or problems. Don't assume you won't have any such issues. You'd be the very first companies in history to be so lucky!

Months 11 and 12: Debugging, Documentation 
So certain is it that there will be problems of some kind that two months should be allocated for resolving all of them. Sometimes, fixing one problem will cause two others. That's just the way it is.

And finally, I have not included a full discussion of documentation in this overview for the sake of simplicity, but you need to pay attention to it. Review whatever documentation the vendor has provided to be sure it is current (it is often anything but!). If there is no adequate documentation, you should devote these two months to working with the vendor to create it specifically for your use. It can be on-line or a PDF or other format (including Evernote), and if possible, it should have keywords or an index for easy reference.

Finally, your business is constantly evolving. Work closely with your system vendor to make sure that your new system evolves with you to the extent that is possible. Remember, you're part of each other's "families" now, and you need to keep those connections refreshed and friendly!

P.S. If you are reading this in September, your new system should be truly and fully ready to Go Live this time next year, which is the perfect time for merchants who have a heavy fourth quarter order volume. Your company will be very busy in the fall, but you can be assured that when the orders start ramping up you will be able to handle them on your new stable and functional solution!

Questions? Please contact me at ernie@schell.com

4 Steps to Getting Started with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation

"Most data managers have now heard enough about the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation that they’ve moved beyond denial, anger, bargaining, and depression to grudging acceptance that it will indeed require major changes in their operations," writes David Raab in an August 7 posting on the Information Management website. But this leaves many wondering exactly how to move ahead in adapting to the new regime.

Be sure to check out David's post - 4 steps to getting started with GDPR compliance - for all the details. 

Seattle startup offers online merchants overnight ground delivery to virtually the entire country

According to Supply Chain Brain, "In less than five years, Flexe has created a marketplace of spare storage space in 550 warehouses, quickly establishing better geographic coverage than the vast delivery network that Amazon.com Inc. spent decades and billions building. Flexe did it without spending a nickel on facilities and already has 25 million square feet of storage, about 25 percent of Amazon's capacity, and expects to add 10 million square feet this year. Merchants book storage space via a simple-to-navigate website; Flexe is essentially the Airbnb of warehousing.

"The new overnight delivery service, launching this week, is well-timed because online merchants are looking for new ways to reach customers but have few options that match Amazon’s speed. And because the inventory is stashed all over the country, overnight deliveries can be made by truck rather than plane, which is cheaper. Online brands such as mattress seller Casper also like Flexe because orders flow through their own websites, letting them maintain a direct relationship with customers."

The Progress Group becomes Crimson & Co North America

After two years in partnership, The Progress Group is renamed Crimson & Co and continues to extend its global footprint with offices worldwide beginning May 15, 2017

Leading U.S. supply chain consultancy The Progress Group LLC (TPG) is becoming Crimson & Co, whose global market includes Europe, Australia, South America and Asia.

For the past two years as part of the Crimson & Co network, TPG and Crimson & Co have brought expanded capabilities and expertise to the global market. This step in TPG’s strategy for growth is to offer a greater scope of supply chain consulting services in North America and globally, with one vision, and one name.

Bruce Strahan, President of The Progress Group, stated, “After more than a quarter century as The Progress Group, we’re proud to announce we will now be known as Crimson & Co. While we take the official name of Crimson & Co, our experienced local team and commitment to high quality and service will not change.”

Richard Powell, CEO of Crimson & Co, based in London, said “In 2014 we started our global partnership and it has proven valuable for our clients by enhancing our capabilities worldwide, as we continue to work towards our strategic vision. We are pleased to be taking this next natural step in solidifying our global brand, especially with The Progress Group team.”

Strahan continued, “By working as close partners with Crimson & Co over the past two years, we have learned that our global reach and combined industry experience offers our clients a significantly enhanced depth of value. We look forward to continued growth for Crimson & Co.”

Crimson & Co NA, formerly The Progress Group, provides a range of services including strategic planning, facility and operations design, cost reduction, process improvement and program management and its expertise includes design through implementation of supply chain initiatives and supporting IT solutions.

About TPG, now Crimson & Co NA:

Crimson & Co North America (formerly The Progress Group) is a management consultancy specializing in supply chain management and logistics. Established in 1991 and based in Atlanta, Georgia, they provide services to Fortune 100 as well as mid-market clients. Crimson & Co NA offers services ranging from strategic planning, facility and operations design, cost reduction, process improvement to program management. Expertise includes design through implementation of supply chain initiatives and supporting IT solutions. Crimson & Co NA is part of the global brand, Crimson & Co. For more information, please see their global website at http://www.crimsonandco.com/and the NA website at http://www.crimsonandco.us/.

About Crimson & Co:

Crimson & Co is a global supply chain consultancy that thinks differently. It stands shoulder to shoulder with clients as it develops outstanding supply chains, using deep operational experience and broad-based business skills to challenge, guide and implement. Its strength is its consulting team, which it nurtures with care, and it has an approach and culture that its clients believe is unique.

The company was founded in 2003 as a breakaway from one of the major consultancies and its scope spans supply chain strategy, planning, procurement, manufacturing, logistics and customer channels. It operates on all continents, with offices in London, Atlanta, Mumbai, Melbourne, São Paulo and Singapore, and typical clients are blue-chip organisations such as Sony, Diageo, Carlsberg, BAT, GSK, Tesco and Merck.

For more information, please see: www.crimsonandco.com

DeviceBits Brings AI To Customer Support

DeviceBits is a relative newcomer on the software solution scene. Founded in 2015, the Columbus, Ohio–based software company looks to change the way businesses provide customer support to their end users and increase customer retention by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and predictive analytics.

“It’s really an extension of the omnichannel investments that organizations are making around sales and marketing into customer support,” said DeviceBits CEO JC Ramey. “Companies have focused a lot of the effort in that transformation on acquiring customers, but not as much has been spent on retention.”

DeviceBits provides a software suite of products that target the channels where customers want to be served and have their support needs met. This can present a challenge to companies, especially as the number of online channels continues to grow.

“Customers are looking for support where they’re spending time,” Ramey noted. “Oftentimes, that is on their mobile device or on social networks, on company websites and email.”

The challenge for companies becomes how to consistently serve consumer needs in an increasing number of channels while maintaining a consistent experience and still building consumer knowledge and data. DeviceBits achieves both with its software solutions, which Ramey noted is two distinct products.

The first, called Academy, is a consumer- and internal-facing, self-learning knowledge base of customer support content. Academy provides contact information if users need to call, message or chat about their issues. It also features integratable interactive tutorial guides, videos and adaptive FAQs for products.

The self-learning aspect is key, said Ramey, for a number of reasons. The AI scores the effectiveness and relevance of content, minimizing the amount of time that an agent needs to spend with customers or the customer needs to spend in messengers or chats to resolve issues.

For call-ins, this can work to increase first-call resolution as well as reduce the amount of time representatives need to spend with each customer, which Ramey said can translate to some serious return on investment (ROI).

“For some organizations, every minute on the phone can cost them anywhere from $4 to $12,” he said. “When you have an organization with 10,000 agents handling 70 million calls a year, it builds a very quick ROI.”

The second product, called Support Predict, builds off of DeviceBits’ curated knowledge base in Academy, from public sources and prior consumer interactions, said Ramey, to predict, evaluate, score and surface support content based on user demographics and data.

The more calls and messages that come in and get resolved, the more the system learns and optimizes, further speeding up the process the next time around.

“With Support Predict, we channel the data to provide a more personalized experience for that customer and getting them to that resolution faster,” Ramey said.

Today, DeviceBits’ three largest markets are in telecommunications, financial services and retail. The company’s largest client is TracFone, which Ramey referenced in an example of how DeviceBits can benefit an enterprise client.

“Not only are there 18,000 agents enabled to use us, but we’ve also built automation into Alexa, we built automation into messaging bots and chat bots to serve their clients, and we are learning all the time from all of those different channels,” he said.

DeviceBits works on the product end as well. For TracFone, this comes in the form of shortcode on the item packaging that allowing potential customers to access how-to guides before buying.

“It becomes an important metric when you’re talking about consumer goods,” Ramey said, “especially for companies like GoPro or FitBit — companies with high-cost return rates. Anything they can do to educate the buyer before they make the purchase and unpackaging that device leaves them a significant amount of value.”

The same principle applies for DeviceBits’ client Careem, the taxi-hailing app and competitor to Uber in the Middle East. Careem uses DeviceBits’ Academy solution as one way to onboard and retain customers, Ramey said.

“It gets the customer familiar and comfortable with the application, and they collect those metrics to see where the user might be struggling or looking for help,” said Ramey. “That way they can make improvements in the next release.”

For the future of customer service, Ramey doesn’t see channel proliferation dying down anytime soon. What may soon change, he said, is how organizations view their customer base.

“A lot of these markets are very saturated today,” he said. “They’re swapping customers. The focus on acquisition will shift to retention — there’s a significant benefit to the organization of keeping their customers.”

SageNet Deploys Cryptzone Security App to Reduce Cost of PCI Compliance

TULSA, OK - May 11, 2017 - Tulsa-based SageNet has leveraged an authentication gateway security application to help large, multi-site retailers better meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance standards and improve their data security.

SageNet's cybersecurity services were recently brought on to help a large retailer with 700+ store locations in North America improve its PCI audit process. These audits measure retailers' operations for protecting cardholder data, building and maintaining a secure network, implementing strong access control measures, and regularly monitoring and testing networks, among other measurements. Retailers can pay penalties and even lose the ability to accept credit cards if their PCI program is not in compliance.

SageNet leveraged Cryptzone's AppGate application to reduce the customer's PCI scope and meet all industry compliance standards while also reducing the time and cost involved in fulfilling audit requirements. Not only was this beneficial in fulfilling the retailer's compliance mandates, but efficiencies also were achieved in day-to-day operations.

Said Paul Truitt, SageNet Chief Technology and Security Officer, "...we're creating a 'next generation' software-defined access control solution for customers that offers a much greater level of security control on how you provision and give users access to your systems."

AppGate enables organizations to adopt a Software-Defined Perimeter approach for stricter security control through creation of a secure authentication gateway. Users log into AppGate, which then provides users with secure access to only the authorized system or application, verifying user context and attributes before granting access to an application. Everything else on the network is invisible to the user. Once the user logs out, the secure tunnel disappears. The session can also be logged and monitored for complete visibility of all access activity.

"Our work with this multi-site retailer was the first time this technology was utilized this way, but we have since gone on to use it in several other deployments," Truitt added. "It's wonderful when technology can be leveraged to solve a problem not only for an immediate client but also for clients across an entire industry."

Business Value Award

In recognition of the innovative use of this technology, on April 11 SageNet was announced as a Business Value Award winner in the 2017 Channel Partners 360° Awards program, which honors channel partners that take a holistic approach to technology solutions and creating business value for their customers.

"We are honored to be a recipient of this award," said SageNet President Brad Wise. "It's recognition of the significant dedication and time that went into helping one of our clients meet a unique need by using an existing security app in a new way. AppGate is a great product, and we already see how this same process could be adopted by many of our clients to solve similar needs."

"As a strategic partner of Cryptzone's, SageNet leveraged our AppGate solution to address a PCI compliance challenge," added Tina Gravel, Cryptzone Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances. "SageNet recognized an existing business problem and creatively used the AppGate technology to fill an important need for the customer." 

For more information about SageNet, visit www.sagenet.com or call 866-480-2263.

About SageNet

SageNet designs, implements, manages and protects fast, secure and reliable networks that empower organizations to achieve their core business objectives.  

SageNet manages communications at more than 160,000 locations. The company's customer base represents many of the nation's leading retail, healthcare, financial and energy companies, as well as public utilities, state lotteries and government agencies.

SagNet's cybersecurity solutions are all backed by a nationwide field service organization and three 24/7 U.S.-based Network and Security Operations Centers.

Headquartered in Tulsa, SageNet also has regional offices in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia.