Technological advances turned the retail industry on its head. Consumers expect to shop across multiple channels seamlessly while retailers work to align with this environment. How do they maintain customer demand shifts? Retail ERP, or ERP software that automates numerous retail sectors.

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This article explains ERP retail software, its top benefits, key features and finding the proper application for your company.

What This Article will Cover

• Role of ERP in Retail Landscape
• Benefits
  • Enhances Customer Management
  • Simplifies Inventory Upkeeping
  • Offers Real-Time Information and Centralization
• Key Features
  • Inventory Management
  • CRM
  • Sales Order Management
  • Customer Account Management
  • Omnichannel Order Management
  • Purchasing/Supplier Management
  • Reporting
  • Point of Sale (POS)
• Trends
  • ECommerce/Mobile Shopping
  • Personalized Solutions
  • Digital Transformation
• When to Invest
• Finding the Right Software
• Tips for Vendor Browsing
• System Complexity
• Retail Industries
• Final Thoughts

Role of ERP in Retail Landscape

Consumers expect to shop via mobile devices, social media platforms and brick-and-mortar stores. Retail ERP solutions align with these challenges beautifully.

This system possesses wide-ranging capabilities that automate navigation between the various channels of the omnichannel retail experience. It facilitates rapid data movement so that decision-makers can reach the best possible outcomes with well-informed, real-time, data-driven choices.

In short, retail ERP solutions carry many benefits and features for your organization and clientele. Let’s examine how this system simplifies daily routines and aligns with your objectives.

Benefits

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Enhances Customer Management

With the proper customer relationship management (CRM) tools, you can observe and manage customer data, product reviews, essential demographics, demand and other critical KPIs. These capabilities ensure you know how to maintain current clients and offer techniques to grow your existing client base.

For example, you may operate a giant cookie factory and wonder whether you want to bring back one of several old cookies for the summer. Your CRM features can generate reports on cookie performances. If sales were high, the customer likely enjoyed a particular flavor. If sales were down or nonexistent, that specific cookie should stay in the grave with other failed flavors.

Simplifies Inventory Upkeep

Inventory management enables you to maintain available stock and plan for the future without over or understocking vital ingredients.

If you’re to buy materials for your cookies, you’d want to ensure you have the necessities (eggs, milk, flour, butter, etc.). You can also receive notifications if your materials are low or expiring, so you can properly replenish objects and avoid contaminating products.

Other vital inventory management tools and requirements include:

• Order Management
• Tracking
• Shipping
• Transfer Management
• Purchasing

Offers Real-Time Information and Centralization

The current retail environment is set up for retailers to respond directly and quickly to customer demands, whether it’s customer service through a social media platform or sending automated delivered package notifications.

ERP engages with a business in a dynamic and integrated manner, which helps executives gain a strategic view of their retail business. Centralized data and functionality allow for swift information transfers.

Without such a system, a retailer could face confusing interfaces, disconnected pricing systems between channels and inconsistent KPI management.

Key Features

Retail ERP systems address many business areas, such as CRM, accounting and inventory management. Before evaluating different retail ERP vendors, it’s essential to understand this system’s basic features.

Inventory Management

As aforementioned in our benefits section, this integration or capability ensures you maintain your available materials and raw ingredients. Some tools even allow you to establish minimum amounts, so you’ll automatically receive notifications when you hit these numbers. These alerts help you develop replenishment strategies before reaching stockouts on your high-value objects.

An example of inventory management capabilities.

Shipping modules automate the process to ensure on-time deliveries. You can also create labels, manage multi-carrier shipping practices and more.

CRM

A preview of CRM tools.

Whether you’re managing client feedback, reviewing specific demand periods or generating in-depth reports, the ideal CRM requirements ensure you keep customers first and make ideal decisions. You’ll also comprehend how you want to reach new patrons with better marketing and campaign tactics for social media, emails, websites, etc.

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Sales Order Management

Monitor each phase of the sales order process from generation to final delivery.

One order has a dozen chocolate chip cookies, five frosted strawberry cookies and 10 shortbread cookies. This system can review that order to understand quantities, total costs, payment methods and shipping speeds. Once you collect the payment, you can send the order to the process manufacturing sector to cook/process the order.

An example of a sales order management interface.

Then you can manage how you want to distribute it along your supply chain and monitor it until it reaches its final destination.

Customer Account Management

Wanna reward loyal customers? Need to create new client profiles? Wanna allocate memberships to longtime clients? This module enables you to do all of these things and more. Customers keep your business afloat, and giving them rewards incentivizes them to keep coming back.

A preview of a customer account management tool.

Regular patrons can also inform their friends and family about your business, increasing your customer base and revenue.

Omnichannel Order Management

End-to-end software management across channels (i.e. your website or physical stores) ensures efficient customer orders and inventory management from any medium. Visibility into current inventory permits you to fulfill orders from anywhere in the supply chain.

An example of an omnichannel order management interface.

In addition to several brick-and-mortar stores, you have a website for patrons to order your cookies. This tool can manage all orders and consolidate data in one hub. You may also monitor all inventory. If your Denver location ran out of frosted chocolate snickerdoodles, but your Chicago store has an abundance, customers can order them online.

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Purchasing/Supplier Management

Maintain purchase approvals, price lists, quotes, source-to-pay cycles, etc., in one centralized system. You can also manage and evaluate suppliers to ensure they’re delivering stock items and products to the right locations.

A preview of purchasing capabilities.

If you’re transferring flour, eggs, milk and other vital ingredients to your Tennessee cookie factory from Florida, you can track routes trucks take. You can also rate suppliers on how well they deliver products and weed out the good from the bad and the ugly.

Reporting

If you don’t have the right tools, it’s not a walk in the park to keep up with analytics and reports. Whether you invest in standalone enterprise reporting software or individual function requirements, you can kiss second guesses, filing cabinets and unreliable data goodbye.

An example of reporting tools.

These tools and dashboards offer real-time analytics and reporting to ensure you’re making the right moves. Thorough reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools allow you to monitor numerous KPIs such as:

• Employee Retention
• Warehouse Management Statuses
• Return on Investment (ROI)
• Market Demand Changes
• Cybersecurity Status Reports
• ECommerce Cart Abandonment Rates
• And more!

Point of Sale (POS)

Whether you need standalone software or add-on features and hardware, POS simplifies how you collect consumer payments, whether it’s via mobile applications, self-service kiosks or at desks in salons, restaurants or other establishments. This system can also manage customers, inventory, reports and employees.

If one of your cookie shops in Seattle has high numbers but your New York location has a slump, a POS solution can provide the correct data to detect and help address bottlenecks. Maybe employees aren’t motivated enough and need incentives to keep working, or you’re lacking an effective customer loyalty platform.

A preview of a POS system.

You can also invest in different hardware, including:

• Receipt Printers
• Cash Drawers
• Credit Card Readers
• Touchscreen Monitors/Tablets
• Barcode Scanners

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Trends

It’s not enough to invest in ERP for retail. There are technological trends to adopt that can streamline mundane tasks and increase productivity. For those who think new trends are scary, it’s essential to understand that, like ERP, you have to find the technology that best aligns with your company. Investing in every trend causes more headaches and creates more problems than solutions

ECommerce/Mobile Shopping

It’s no surprise that eCommerce and mobile shopping, aka mobile commerce or m-commerce, have surged in the last few years. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, eCommerce and mobile shopping were the primary ways for most people to do their grocery shopping. Before the pandemic, some people likely relied on Amazon and other online retailer giants.

According to Research and Markets, the global eCommerce market will hit $55.6 trillion by 2027. Adopting eCommerce, if you’re able, reaches a bigger client base.

Personalized Solutions

ERP no longer means a one-size-fits-all standard. There are solutions for small businesses and startups as well as mid-sized and enterprise-level organizations. Some companies don’t need marketing automation (MA), BI or business analytics (BA), while others want systems dedicated to accounting and CRM.

You can now personalize solutions to align with your retail practices. If you need POS, inventory management or any other features mentioned in the previous section, you can tailor your system. Some, if not all, customizations may cost you more, but it can be well worth the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Digital Transformation

In a nutshell, digital transformation means an organization adopts digital technologies to craft or revise old workflows. These operations range from business practices to client support. Think of it as your business getting a facelift to adapt to modernized and more-streamlined solutions.

Still on the fence about this trend? Research and Markets expect the global digital transformation market (i.e., AI, cloud computing, big data, cybersecurity, IoT and more) to reach $1247.5 billion by 2026.

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When to Invest

This first question is difficult to measure in generic terms because each business has unique deciding factors. A carefully selected ERP platform can service companies for at least five to 10 years. A common, stable platform with easy customization has the potential to evolve with your company as it grows and changes.

A new retail business just starting would only require a basic ERP system, while a chain (five–10 locations) will require more complex software. An example of an alternate option is cloud-based ERP solutions; you can save on up-front costs because you pay as you go, and you get a more straightforward implementation.

In short, it is time to invest when employees are becoming tied up on tasks that could become automated through software. Financial considerations are essential as this can be a significant investment, but attempting to run a business across multiple locations could become more costly than investing in an ERP system.

Finding the Right Software

Finding the right ERP for retail is like playing the lottery if you don’t have a sense of direction. Thankfully, SelectHub has structured a nine-step software selection methodology for choosing the right system called Lean Selection. These nine steps are as follows:

• Establish: Understand why you need a new solution or add-ons to your current platform.
• Collaborate: Formulate a strong software selection committee to help you better establish and define software requirements.
• Define: Talk to all software selection committee members (including department heads of your company) to brainstorm and craft the ideal solution requirements and features list.
• Distribute: Take time to evaluate and shortlist potential vendors.
• Justify: Gather the ideal information from vendors to justify why you should consider purchasing their software. See how well each vendor ranks against your requirements.
• Prove: Ask vendors for demos, use cases and proof of concepts (POCs) to understand how the program operates with specific features.
• Rank: Rate your top three vendors based on their TCO and how they fared in the previous step with demo scoresheets.
• Negotiate: Sit down with your ideal vendor and negotiate terms until you reach a formidable compromise. If you can’t reach an agreement, talk with your second or third vendor from the previous step.
• Sign: Once you’ve reached an agreement with your preferred vendor, review and sign their contract. Then you can begin the implementation steps.

Tips for Vendor Browsing

Here are some tips to consider as you review different vendors:

1. Look for a vendor with a retail-specific background; this will yield a higher quality experience for you.
2. Research a vendor’s solvency to ensure they’ll remain in business should you require their assistance.
3. Question the level of service and support post-purchase.
4. Take your time in making a decision. Retail ERP software (or any business software) is expensive. Also, the implementation process is complex and time-consuming.

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System Complexity

Company size, business process complexities and retail industries (which we’ll discuss in the next section) play a role in your software search. Basic functionalities include:

• Accounting/General Ledger
• Human Resources
• POS and Store Management
• Warehouse Management
• Supply Chain Management
• CRM
• BI

Retail Industries

This solution caters to different retail branches, from general to farming and pharmaceutical. Here are some examples of other retail sectors and their complimenting ERP features.

General

• Product handling features, customer relationship management software and customer loyalty/satisfaction tools measure and evaluate relationships between businesses and customers.
• Various BI features help the retail business look at inventories, sales numbers and business processes effectively.
• Other tools will help with business processes such as physical store administration, price margin evaluation and stocking.

Farm and Home

• Order entry and tracking systems can help managers better supervise e-commerce operations.
• Mobile POS equipment can help wrangle different sizes and volumes of items on specific floors.
• Inventory and supply chain modules can help businesses supervise real estate costs and other factors.
• Specific CRM handles seasonal promotional codes or coupons.

Pharmacy

• Mobile POS assists with ringing up pharmacy transactions at various locations. Record-keeping features can help maintain prescription purchasing compliances.
• Pharmacy ERP tackles two business facets: the customer-facing side with CRM, pricing and other tools and the healthcare side.
• Healthcare tools typically possess temperature regulation features within an inventory control monitor. This tool simplifies quality control and enhances compliance regulation adherence.

Automotive

• Pricing tools will assist in building current prices for original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and aftermarket products, while parts identification features supervise inventory.

B2B or Contractor Centers

• Automated purchase tools streamline B2B transactions.
• B2B systems offer large merchandise shipments for bricks, wood, concrete, etc.

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Final Thoughts

Retail ERP is a versatile, all-encompassing solution that facilitates day-to-day business responsibilities. Additionally, this ERP carries many benefits, features and trends to boost customer satisfaction. For more ERP solution types, review our thorough comparison guide.

Do you have any questions or thoughts about ERP for retail? Let us know in the comments below!