| |March 20199CIOReviewERPs are geared towards a pure B2B approach for warehouse management, financial re-con-ciliations, etc. However, with the advent of e-commerce, these same systems are now being modified to cater to B2C selling to customers also. In my experience, below are some ar-eas where brands face a lot of struggle while adopting to e-Commerce and are consequently opportunity areas for IT teams to help grow the e-Commerce business. WarehousingMost sellers' warehouses are created to fulfill offline B2B orders to distributors, franchisees, stores, etc. For such order fulfillment, packing & dispatching is done in bulk and achieving truck loads efficiency is an important crite-ria. However, for e-commerce, each individual order has to be picked, packed as per market-place requirements & dispatched separately with different courier partners. Here, efficient "first time right" order fulfillment is the primary criteria. e-Commerce order fulfillment efficiency can be drasti-cally improved by building algorithms that work in con-junction with the warehouse management system and help in dynamic binning allocation during in-warding and provide flexibility during dispatch. There are some e-Commerce oriented warehouse management systems available that fully integrate with market-places, courier partners and ERPs so that the entire flow from the cus-tomer placing the order to the courier partner delivering the product can be tracked from one dashboard. The next level of efficiency in the e-Commerce warehousing opera-tions can be brought in by deploying robotic sorters that reduce points of failure in dispatch operations. Financial re-conciliationThe e-Commerce market-places operate in different mod-els such as B2B, B2C, sell or return, outright sale to recom-mended sellers, etc. All remittances done by the market-places to the brand have deductions such as commissions, logistics cost, payment gateway charges, penalties, etc. and these also dynamically vary during sale periods. Ad-ditionally, different taxation scenarios become applicable depending on the operating model and locations. In such scenarios, having a clear view of outstanding from each market-place and calculating the e-Commerce channel P&L and cash flow becomes a very cumbersome activity. These issues can be effectively addressed by having a clear strategy to manage master data and credit availabilities related to agents (market-places) and distributors (preferred sellers). It is also highly recommended to map the different e-Commerce sales scenar-ios completely in the ERP and provide dif-ferent pricing procedures, tax codes and seller codes. Third party add-ons are now available that directly integrate the market-place's remit-tances to the ERP so that automatic re-conciliations and settlements are triggered during remittances. Product catalogingCorrect product information and display of complete cat-alog in the market-place websites play a key role in both increasing the e-Commerce sales and reducing the returns. Adding a process of quality check during dispatches helps in further reducing the returns. Cataloging & uploading the product information in each market-place becomes cumbersome as each market-place follows a different template and these templates also constantly evolve. Ad-ditionally, key master data elements are also different for each market-place. To address this, tools are now available that integrate with the ERP to pull the product master, enhance the catalog and share it with the market-places in their prescribed templates. They also dynamically change the catalog templates when the market-places modify it and provide suitable dashboard features to give a bird's eye view of catalog readiness. Customer analyticse-Commerce orders give a plethora of structured data that can be used to identify market trends & patterns. An analytics engine that runs on the combined e-Commerce data and offline sales data can provide deep insights on customer behavior, product sales velocity, geographical distribution, logistics costs, etc. This can be used to im-prove all aspects of business including production & of-fline sales. The above highlighted points are the quick wins that any enterprise IT team can take to help the organization embrace & simplify e-commerce. As the e-Commerce business matures and starts becoming a meaningful sales channel in the organization, then the next wave of IT initiatives focused on the customer - such as CRM based customer segmentation, targeting approaches, propensity models, etc. can be taken up. Krishnan Subramanian
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