What Matters Most to Your New Retail Customers? Products on the Shelves!

This is the last of our three-part series answering the questions “What Matters Most to Your New Retail Customers?” In part one we asked the looming question: “How do I address what matters most to today’s New Retail customers?” In part two, the key message was making certain that your Retail Value Chain (RVC) empowers your company’s ability to provide retail consumers with product visibility — either in the form of product location (e.g. nearest store or arriving to distribution center, etc.) or its delivery status (e.g. delayed, out for delivery, etc.). This knowledge helps anxious consumers remain calm and refrain from purchasing products elsewhere.

In this final installment of this blog series, we’re going further upstream to the suppliers from whom retailers order products that are made available for online or in-store purchases. This “hidden from consumer view” purchase to pay (P2P) process is also key to what matters most to New Retail customers — making sure products are available in real time.

Why does onboarding automation matter?

Let’s start this blog with an insightful story about supplier and retailer automation. A large, prominent electronics retailer made a strategic and operational decision to automate the supplier onboarding of its very large supplier base.  The retailer moved from manual, error-prone and time-consuming supplier onboarding of both strategic and seasonal suppliers to an automated onboarding system. As a result, the retailer reduced its onboarding time from 60+ days to five days — a 90% reduction in just days! Plus, there is a zero backlog of suppliers to onboard.  But more importantly, they enabled a streamlined path for faster order fulfillment.

Why does this onboarding automation story matter? For the electronics retailer, it meant increasing the availability of products for their omnichannel retail customers. For their suppliers, it meant ensuring their competitive brands were also in the hands of New Retail consumers!  Bottom line? Happier customers and business growth!

What are the four core objectives of automated partner onboarding?

In today’s “now” economy, expectations for quality products delivered on time and in their entirety continue to increase. Automating, or in this case “onboarding,” suppliers that are strategically essential for the successful operations of your New Retail business and its core objectives is essential. These core objectives include:

1. revenue growth,
2. market share retention and growth,
3. costs reductions and
4. increased efficiencies,

to name just a few.

What are the main challenges for successful supplier onboarding and supply chain management?

Given that supply chains are now global networks, supply chain management of the vast supplier networks, as well as ensuring real-time data in the supply chain, is complex and challenging. It is a very costly, people-intensive and error-prone endeavor to manually (paper or email) execute P2P processes (e.g. orders, acknowledgements and invoices, etc.) with hundreds of supplies, because traditional manual efforts hinder your agility and ability to quickly and efficiently order and receive products in a timely manner. Paper exchanges with suppliers are especially slow and prone to errors. However, when suppliers are onboarded and can move to electronic information exchanges, then the exchanges (e.g. orders and products) are faster and less prone to errors.

Right now, a large number of retailers are attempting to manually onboard their suppliers. The manual supplier onboarding process is filled with many burdens, while the email-based supplier onboarding steps are very long and resource intensive. The total time to manually onboard can be 60 days or more and consume IT headcount hours. Plus, the backlog of suppliers that need to be onboarded will continue to grow.

Is automating your supplier onboarding process a good strategic initiative to undertake?

For many retailers that are using manual techniques, the answer is yes.  Plus, there are many core benefits for the retailer’s business, and here’s why: The P2P cycles are very complex, because they touch on many parts of the RVC, from purchasing to supply chain management and, of course, accounts payable. Each department tends to experience many challenges when suppliers that have not been onboarded are using manual methods for business exchanges.

Here are some very possible benefits that three business departments could achieve, at a minimum, when retail partner onboarding and supplier onboarding is automated, moving partners and suppliers into the world of digital retail:

• Purchasing department:
  • Reduction in cycle times from when orders are placed to when products arrive to retain loyal customers
  • An offset of safety stock levels, as well as associated shrinkage and high inventory costs caused by slowed ordering cycles

• Supply Chain department:
  • Faster responses to unexpected market product changes or new business needs requiring new suppliers
  • Faster onboarding of new suppliers that can deliver new products to consumers faster than ever before, to retain or gain new market share

• Accounting department
  • Reduction in time and cost to reconcile supplier invoices or eliminate numerous duplicate invoices
  • Reduction in volumes of supplier inbound calls checking the status of invoices

For some retailers, you can see how supplier onboarding and process digitalization is worth the effort for everyone involved. If a retailer is onboarding suppliers manually, this means that exchanges are still being done by paper, which can be bad for core business objectives. However, automating the supplier onboarding process is a win/win for everyone involved — consumers, suppliers and retailers benefit greatly from taking this major strategic step.  Most importantly, like the electronics retailer in our opening story, the customer will greatly benefit when products are on the shelves thanks to faster order fulfillment!

How SEEBURGER can help

The SEEBURGER Community Management Application enables faster supplier onboarding of your supplier base and seasonal suppliers. It has extended benefits for all stakeholders, as well.