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

Send us Fan Mail Most people think of ERP as a manufacturing or distribution solution. And if you are not a manufacturing company, they feel that ERP systems add very little value to operations and become limited to just finance. While that might be true for some companies such as professional services firms or marketing agencies, companies that are very heavy in assets and field service such as M...

Send us Fan Mail Sales teams are typically known to be completely disconnected from the organization. But if you have a smart sales team, they understand the importance of technology and what it can do to the sales process. The sales technologies have also come a long way. There are so many tools out there that can help with each step of the process. But what are the systems that need to be part o...

Send us Fan Mail For every one second it takes for your website to load, your conversion rate goes down by 10%. But how true is that? Well, speed is a huge factor in ranking on Google. In fact, even if you have mastered the Desktop speed, you might still not rank well if your mobile speed might not be as good. But what are the issues that cause a site to load slower? Are these issues related to ho...

Send us Fan Mail Time series data is all about continuous monitoring of your machines to detect trends with your batches. If you don't collect and analyze the data, you might feel that you don't have capacity to meet customer demand and might be forced to acquire additional capacity or facility if you don't miss the opportunities. But the additional capacity might be right there wit...

Send us Fan Mail If you are in the custom machinery business or building a custom machine using control systems from scratch, you have several challenges. While you might have previous experiences in building similar machines, each job is unique. The materials and the process may vary. The tooling required may be completely different. And then, you need to keep calibrating the interaction of mater...

Send us Fan Mail Most manufacturers relate eCommerce as the B2C experience and swiping the credit card for pre-paid customers. But digital commerce is more than that, especially in the B2B setting. Also, in most cases, most people relate eCommerce as the engine for generating revenue through net-new customers. And they miss the point that digital commerce is about enabling and tailoring the experi...

Send us Fan Mail If you are a small custom manufacturing shop switching off from spreadsheets or QuickBooks, you will likely come across GeniusERP. It is probably the only small ERP that can work with complex assemblies and BOMs in the small ERP category. In the small ERP segment, most ERP systems don't support hybrid manufacturing. And in most cases, they will be able to support a couple of...

Send us Fan Mail If you are responsible for managing operations for your organization, you will find yourself caught in the middle. On one side, you have a sales team that may not commit to driving predictable sales, but they will not allow you to miss even one delivery, even if it may be out of your control. Then on the other side, you have unpredictable factors such as workers not showing up on...

Send us Fan Mail How many shoppers do you know will buy the first time they visit a store Very few, right? It takes some time before we can trust a brand. The same goes for e-commerce. The percentage may be even higher for e-commerce due to low barriers to exit from a site and go to the next one. In fact, more than 95% of the people that visit a website for the first time are not ready to buy. The...

Send us Fan Mail Sales and operations planning is a dark art, and most organizations typically have a very ad-hoc process of forecasting due to its nature. But it's critical to be directionally correct with your plan. Or you might end up missing opportunities or losing customers. Also, planning is more than just creating a model on a spreadsheet. It requires you to come up with estimates and...

Send us Fan Mail Launching a business model could provide a revenue engine and competitive advantage that will be unmatched. But launching a marketplace is not easy. In fact, it's a chicken and egg problem. Your suppliers will ask you to get the customers first. And your customers will need a decent product and vendor mix before they can choose your site over other stronger brands such as Ama...

Send us Fan Mail If you have been thinking about incorporating robotic processes or industry 4.0 controls into your facility, you will have a choice whether you would like to buy the control systems directly from the vendors or program the robotic arms and control systems until you get the desired results from the manufacturing processes. Therefore, irrespective of whether you are a system integra...

Send us Fan Mail There are two ways to grow an ERP company. Either you build products from scratch like SAP, Acumatica, SYSPRO, and NetSuite, etc. Or you acquire several products until you have a solid market share to create a product strategy like Infor, Epicor Software, Sage, and Appian Corporation. While Infor and Epicor were very aggressive with their acquisition strategy in their early days,...

Send us Fan Mail If you ask any manufacturer, they will tell you that the Shop floor is where you make money. You need to make sure you have the right material and the right operator at the right machine. Wasting machine or machinist time is equally expensive. But then your margins may be tight, and you need to make sure you are profitably able to produce the job by optimizing the cycle time. You...

Send us Fan Mail Getting a visitor to your site is not easy. Once you get visitors, keeping them engaged on the site is not easy either. But what is worse is if they end up dropping out without buying. Dropouts could happen because of a lot of reasons. It could be the higher price or shipping options. It could also be the checkout experience if the process may take a longer time than expected. So...

Send us Fan Mail Demand and inventory planning is a dark art that even trained S&OP practitioners struggle to understand. Each company goes through a maturity curve as they scale their operations. They will start with a spreadsheet or a combination of a spreadsheet and an ERP system. They might also do a lot of planning inside the ERP, but the development of those reports could be costly, and...

Send us Fan Mail Did you know that plastic could be more sustainable than paper? Wait, what? Well, to understand sustainability, you need to analyze the complete product lifecycle, identify your KPIs for the critical material waste, and find out how much total waste you have in the entire product life cycle. If you did this, you might learn that paper usage resulted in wasting some other key resou...

Send us Fan Mail Prototyping business is unique since each order is different. Most people would not be able to imagine standardization for this business. You may be building parts of different materials, shapes, and sizes and may require different machines and tooling to process the parts. You may also struggle with material storage requirements and might produce several WIP items as it might be...

Send us Fan Mail While most ERP systems might feel as if they overlap entirely, there is a clear distinction between desktop apps, single-tenant, multi-tenant, and enterprise solutions. You might also need to pay attention to how many levels of BOMs are supported in the solution to ensure that you find an appropriate solution for your company. For example, most solutions that support industries su...

Send us Fan Mail Retaining customers is 10x easier than acquiring them. But you will not be able to create the sticky effect with your customers unless you have a solid strategy behind it. Retention requires a loyalty model that makes your customers feel that they are getting preferential treatment for their loyalty. It also requires you to communicate the value of preferential treatment. Unless y...

Send us Fan Mail While the 3PL and companies involved with freight movement may have much stronger needs for logistics and transportation processes, manufacturers and distributors can't be efficient if they treat logistics as their stepchild. In fact, more and more companies are managing their in-house fleets to meet the consumer expectations of faster delivery and issues such as driver short...

Send us Fan Mail Getting in front of more customers is typically the response of most manufacturers that might have sales performance issues or ambition to grow their sales. But you need a formalized sales process and a deep understanding of why you might be losing your current deals or how to find the next cohort of customers that might be similar to the ones you currently might have to be succes...

Send us Fan Mail The more regulated a business, the harder the requirements for regulatory compliance. Pharma distribution might feel like a straightforward business, but it has several requirements related to lot and serial number tracking that only exist in this industry. They also have unique channels and how their sales and purchase orders need to be processed in order to be compliant with the...

Send us Fan Mail Most manufacturers started their businesses as they were good at making parts. They grew primarily because of word of mouth with very little investment in marketing and automation. They might be sitting on a pile of inventory and legacy machines due to their lack of understanding of how to invest in modern technologies and processes. They might also lose on the opportunities if th...

Send us Fan Mail Among most software, #ERP systems have always traditionally been the most hated. Each new ERP system that comes to the market seems to claim how they can either expedite the implementation time, increase the adoption, or change the ERP industry. Also, most new systems target smaller niches such as job shops. But the deeper your ERP system is in a specific niche, the less friendly...