WBSRocks: Scaling Growth with AI, Enterprise Software, and Digital Transformation

Send us Fan Mail The announcement about the end of life of an ERP system has fired back every single ERP vendor. Whether we talk about Oracle announcement for JD Edwards, SAP announcement of ECC, or Microsoft announcement of GP, the vendors that have a lot of solutions in their customer base without very strong communities can typically sunset their products very easily without much noise. But tha...

Send us Fan Mail Pricing and discounting will always be a religious debate in the organizations on who controls it. For pricing and discounts to work, you need your inventory and master data to be in order. Or the pricing strategies may fire back due to the inconsistent customer experience. Pricing and discounting are even trickier when multiple systems might be controlling master data and pricing...

Send us Fan Mail For an eCommerce business, inventory is everything. If you don't have enough inventory, you might lose on opportunities. If you have too much, your cash may be locked with the inventory. If you are working with vendors, they will not work with you unless you are willing to work with their preferred minimum order quantity. But those MOQs must make sense for your business as we...

Send us Fan Mail Amazon could appear like a massive opportunity. But to be successful on Amazon, you need a comprehensive strategy starting from SKUs to pricing and to your fulfillment. While Amazon could come across as frightening due to confusing terms and business models, Amazon provides several opportunities for sellers at different levels, including taking care of your entire fulfillment proc...

Send us Fan Mail The audit procedures require end-to-end traceability and visibility into your processes. While they might vary a bit across industries such as medical or aerospace, the fundamentals are still the same. They are the same in how you vet your suppliers, how you ensure that the due dates are accurate on your POs, and finally, how you deliver to your customers with consistency. So how...

Send us Fan Mail What is one thing do you know about Salesforce fans? Well, for one, they absolutely love the salesforce platform. Me included! The love is so intense that they will do anything and everything to remain on Salesforce. And why not? There is not a single CRM platform that comes close to matching the depth and object hierarchy while not being as limiting as the ERP systems? But how wo...

Send us Fan Mail How much of an impact might UoM conversions have on an ERP implementation? Well, if you asked a seasoned guy who has been part of a large implementation, UoM conversions fire back pretty bad. In fact, at times, they could be a make or break for the ERP implementations. The UoM conversions not supported the way your business processes are structured could be the birth of ad-hoc and...

Send us Fan Mail Most businesses struggle with providing consistent pricing across channels. Even when we think of static pricing, the systems and departments are not connected in how they price the product. The accounting may set the cost standards. But sales and marketing might maintain the pricing completely separately in a siloed manner in eComm. The inconsistent pricing experience can come ac...

Send us Fan Mail BOMs inside ERP systems are not designed to track specification data. If you have several variables associated with your BOMs, then you might need to track specifications separately. Even if you have PIM or PLM, you might still need the specification software as that can not only help in creating the product model faster, but it can centralize your specification data, especially i...

Send us Fan Mail If your physical and digital inventory may not be aligned and you don't have KPIs to track your excess inventory and obsolescence, you might be carrying aging inventory, and you might not be aware of that. Also, while some of the inventory may appear aging, if that is the critical inventory for their machines or operations, there may be a chance that you may not have these pa...

Send us Fan Mail The developer community often thinks that the problem associated with ERP complexity or costs is technical. Time after time, we have seen developers championing how concepts such as no-code or open source can solve problems of the ERP world. The problems associated with ERP failures are very rarely technical or product-related. The hardest problem in the ERP world is getting every...

Send us Fan Mail Unit economics is critically important for product-centric businesses. If you don't understand your true cost, you might be selling at a much higher price, which would mean that you might not be able to win against your competitors. Also, if you are selling at a lower price as you may be missing on some cost elements, you might be losing money or selling unprofitable products...

Send us Fan Mail Most companies might start selling on the website without going through the structured thinking of enabling user experience and mapping customer journeys. They may also start coding without going through the design process and wireframing the ideas. Wireframing plays a vital communication tool to align the expectations and test if the design is aligned with the user's expecta...

Send us Fan Mail If you asked most salespeople about whether their software can integrate, their standard answer would be that they have APIs. Well, APIs allow you to retrieve data from systems in a structured fashion and remove the technical boilerplate of that system. You still need to design your integration flows around your business requirements. APIs are NOT meant to have self-integration ca...

Send us Fan Mail The cultural factors drive how users will perceive an ERP or WMS product as each geography may have different ways of processing transactions. They might also be using terms and keywords that they might not be able to relate with in a system that might be built for completely different geography. But the cultural factors are not only limited to just the terms and keywords. Sometim...

Send us Fan Mail Growing through acquisition is not a new strategy. Infor started it. And now several companies are following, especially the PE-owned ones such as ECi and Aptean. PE companies pursue this strategy in the hope of gaining quick market share through edge products or specialized products purpose-built for specific industries. Most of these products are typically built by companies tha...

Send us Fan Mail Cannabis is a beast when it comes to its process complexity. Also, the ever-changing regulatory compliance and reporting increase the challenges. The critical process of cannabis is seed-to-sale that starts with the grower facility, where every plant needs to be tracked. Then, as cannabis moves through the processing stages where even multiple companies could be involved, such as...

Send us Fan Mail How many people here like to receive promotions in SMS? Not many, right? And yet Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of customer service organizations will be using SMS and messaging rather than native apps. SMS could be used for promo, remarketing, order confirmations, and dispatch notifications. SMS is also not as intrusive as other forms of communication such as email and phone....

Send us Fan Mail Industry4.0 could mean a lot of things to different people. While the idea of Industry4.0 is compelling, it requires a lot of moving pieces from identifying appropriate processes for data collection and then having monitoring and alerting infrastructure in place so that the maintenance can take action before it's too late and expensive. Condition monitoring is one area that p...

Send us Fan Mail Amazon has become so big that it has its own constitution and regularly publishes legislation with clear guidelines for vendors and suppliers. While Amazon recognizes the importance of the Vendor ecosystem, they have always been customer-focused. Also, if your business is not diversified, the business buyers might perceive you as a risk as they don't like to see your business...

Send us Fan Mail What's an ERP and what's not an ERP will always be the classic debate in the ERP community. Surprisingly enough, even the largest of the largest companies missed their understanding of the secret sauce for Salesforce. They had always felt that CRM was just a module of ERP. And how much damage could a CRM company cause? Well, Salesforce is no longer just a threat. They ha...

Send us Fan Mail Agriculture and F&B industries are unique beasts when it comes to their ERP needs. They have unique traceability requirements that you might not find with most companies. They also have unique formulation, and their product management processes are fairly involved. One process that is unique with these industries is the field-to-fork process, where the traceability and farm ac...

Send us Fan Mail Life would be easy if we had to sell only to one ideal customer profile and buyer persona. Most companies sell to multiple ideal customer profiles. That makes the job of a marketer much harder. These profiles could vary based on industries, roles, product groups, etc. But what is so hard about managing multiple customer profiles? Well, each customer profile has its needs in terms...

Send us Fan Mail Sheet metal industry produces one of the most foundational products that we need as consumers and in our industrial applications. This industry also requires significant efficiency with operations and raw materials due to cost pressures and ultra-low margins. The recent supply challenges and labor shortages are driving the demand for even more efficiency in how they consume energy...

Send us Fan Mail The challenge with the technology world is that new technologies keep popping up on a daily basis with significant overlap and with no clarity on where and how they will fit in the architecture and what their scope will be as they interact with other systems and cross-functional processes. There is also typically a misunderstanding of a data and analytics system vs. a system that...