As COVID-19 drives more Filipinos to enjoy omnichannel convenience, managing click-and-mortar stores in the supply chain, inventory, payments, and customer service will continue to challenge retailers in 2022.
Stephen Canning, CEO of JCurve Solutions (ASX: JCS), points out that the obstacles start with supply chain management, such as inventory, logistics, and fulfillment of orders which generally affect customer satisfaction. In addition, the adoption of various digital payments of local businesses becomes irrelevant if orders cannot be delivered or picked up at the nearest physical location, especially if fulfillment will take almost a week or more.
“Customer demands have changed. Customers no longer have to wait weeks or even days to receive an order. It plays heavily on logistics and fulfillment to meet customer demands and overall service delivery. With the shift to e-commerce, it has become effortless for a customer to move their business elsewhere if the experience doesn’t match the expectation,” Canning said.
With these difficulties ahead of omnichannel retailers, Canning shared a local trend that may further burden retailers. “Traditional or older generation enterprise retail planning (ERPs) are concentrated on specific functions such as finance, inventory, manufacturing, and internal processes. The business trends of today and the future are moving towards the deployment of holistic solutions that are functional and scalable. No business wants to replace an ERP every three to five years.”
Contrary to traditional ERP, a scalable ERP allows businesses to add and remove functionalities as their operations require, understand consumer buying patterns, and the capability to integrate e-commerce platforms, social media, and third-party logistics platforms. By having all company data in one place without logging in to multiple platforms for data collection, businesses get real-time figures and data-driven analysis, which can crucially help make decisions that will drive business growth.
“With Filipinos’ increasing preference for convenience, proximity, and fast turnaround, optyc, Jcurve’s business management solutions arm, deploys a comprehensive solution such as Oracle NetSuite’s ERP Cloud to unify inventory management, order processing, financial management, reporting, and customer relationship management under one platform,” Canning shared. “Furthermore, businesses can be further enhanced by integrated e-commerce and service management solutions such as Jcurve’s quicta, to assist in meeting the complete cycle of order through to delivery for customers, and consulting such as Jcurve’s vyzeri.”
With over 13 years of experience in serving clients across the Asia Pacific, Jcurve is positioned as a business transformation company that aims to drive growth through the effective use of technology. In the Philippines, Jcurve is a premier Oracle NetSuite partner and Oracle’s largest partner globally in terms of customer base.