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

Send us Fan Mail A warehouse is a critical component to drive operational efficiency, especially if your company moves a lot of goods. The warehouse is also the area, which is typically the start of the automation, and if you operate your warehouse without barcodes, it might take forever to deliver the goods. Also, with ASRS systems and robots, the sky is the limit with what you could do to treat...

Send us Fan Mail Retaining customers is easier and cheaper than acquiring customers. But unless you continuously acquire, you might have growth challenges. You can't simply rely on word-of-mouth channels. Customer acquisition is especially critical for e-commerce. For your customer acquisition to work effectively, you need to master your ideal customer profile and the messaging that will work...

Send us Fan Mail As you grow, you will be getting a lot of offers to get acquired. You might also be acquiring the companies, especially if you might not be able to meet your growth plans through organic channels. Whichever side of the M&A process you might happen to be on, you will only get value from the transaction if it is successfully executed. The most common reasons why acquisitions fai...

Send us Fan Mail The social proof is becoming real, especially for B2C and FMCG brands with the advancements in social media and influencer marketing concepts. Also, with the increased competition, it's becoming harder to get placed at shelves in high-traffic areas. Even so, there are several newer technologies out there, such as mass customer mobilization, that can help get visibility for yo...

Send us Fan Mail What could you do if your business were not able to break through and grow as expected? What would you do if the close rate were extremely low and you couldn't do anything about it as your channel controlled the sales process? While there are several options to help with this issue, including going DTC, the path is extremely risky, especially if you might be taking this path...

Send us Fan Mail Traditional IT required you to stress test programming languages, databases, and server farms based on your expected workload. You designed the system based on the size of your organization. If you are buying an ERP system, you obviously don't have to go through the testing and measurement process as you assume that ERP vendors and salespeople must sell to the right-sized org...

Send us Fan Mail Procurement plays an extremely important role in ensuring that you have the right raw materials at the right place at the right time. They are also responsible for the S&OP planning, which is the hardest to master, and misaligned S&OP functions could significantly impact the top and bottom line. And they are often left behind when it comes to their technology needs. They a...

Send us Fan Mail If you are an e-commerce business, you need to have your margins at your fingertips. Understanding your margins for each of your SKUs lets you know if any of the products might be a good fit for marketplaces. They also help you assess if you have enough margin for customs duties on international sales. Finally, they will help you understand if you can offer free shipping, bundle d...

Send us Fan Mail Most companies are very rarely effective with their pricing strategies. They might have very simplified pricing strategies such as cost-plus to avoid the analyst overhead and lose money by not charging enough. Or they might have very manual processes to monitor competing SKUs at marketplaces or over the web and might lose their margins with the admin overhead. While monitoring pri...

Send us Fan Mail The automotive industry has always been challenging for manufacturers and distributors serving it. You might have ultra-thin margins with every year the OEMs threatening to reduce the costs further. You also have had traditional demand forecasting issues where the demand forecasted by industry groups may be off by as much as 50%. Also, with COVID and supply chain issues, the job o...

Send us Fan Mail How hard could running a store be? Isn't it as simple as keeping a bunch of products, renting a place, and selling? Also, how hard could it be when you have multiple locations where customers expect consistent experience when they visit any of the stores? Well, if e-commerce is hard, running a retail chain that is known for its customer experience like Starbucks or WholeFoods...

Send us Fan Mail You can't spell Automotive without the mention of Plex. While not as penetrated as other bigger players such as Infor, Epicor, or SAP, Plex has had a significant impact on the ERP community due to the quality of its product. That's probably the reason Rockwell decided to acquire them. But the bigger reason why Rockwell acquired them is because of their MES and IoT capabi...

Send us Fan Mail Even though CFOs and Controllers are responsible for driving the transformation inside the company, they often have to put the needs of their peers in operations, sales, and HR before their own needs. Also, technology decisions are always about trade-offs. If you make the life of customer-facing teams easier, it would mean that your backend teams might need to work harder to meet...

Send us Fan Mail While free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you provide some insights into your funnel and customer behavior, you are simply scratching the surface with the amount of analytics you would need to drive marketing results. With multiple systems being used in the e-commerce architecture, including CRM, website, PIM, and marketplaces, you need a central...

Send us Fan Mail If you plan to acquire ISO or AS, one of the critical steps for this journey would be to go through the internal audit process. But who is responsible for internal audits? Is it the external consultants who will be providing the certifications? Is it the quality department? Or is it department heads? While it may seem counter-intuitive, the role of external consultants is not to d...

Send us Fan Mail As you grow, you will go through several stages of S&OP maturity. Sales always conservatively estimate the inventory as they don't want to miss any opportunities. But finance executives want to reduce the inventory as much as possible as that has carrying costs. While you might be aware of the inventory issues, solving them is hard, as they require cross-functional collab...

Send us Fan Mail You might not worry about vendors until one day your production line stops because you didn't realize that you had a single point of failure with your processes. You might also make a strategic choice to simplify your processes by choosing just one vendor for most of your components. But while you might not have issues as of today as you may have had reliable vendors supporti...

Send us Fan Mail Most large enterprise customers rarely look for an ERP solution outside of SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft as they offer comprehensive global solutions with localizations in most countries. This allows you to use a truly global solution without requiring a country-specific solution for the countries where non-global solutions fall short. When it comes to a truly global solution, some i...

Send us Fan Mail Building information architecture for e-commerce companies is not easy. Most e-commerce companies serve B2B and B2C, so they need customer-facing websites along with an ERP. But then, with the blurring business models, e-commerce companies, especially those that are DTC, are expected to do a lot more, including managing their complex warehouses and sometimes their fleet for the la...

Send us Fan Mail There is so much talk about marketing automation. But, is marketing automation about automating the entire marketing, so you don't have to hire anyone in the marketing department? Or is it about predicting and creating engagements through content at every step of the way as buyers move through the funnel? How much investment does marketing automation require? Are there any be...

Send us Fan Mail While ERP systems have come a long way with their capabilities and faster time-to-value, these investments still take a long time to deliver value to your business, even if you may have gone live within 90 days. Also, you will uncover real issues with the ERP system once you start running your business on the new system due to the lack of interest from most stakeholders during the...

Send us Fan Mail If you are a warehouse manager, your goal will be to get as many shipments out of the door as fast as possible. You might also be tempted to compare your ratios with other similar warehouses or the warehouses of your competitors. But as each business is different, each warehouse and its ratios will be different as well. So while you need to consider the warehouses and inventory as...

Send us Fan Mail The larger the organization, the harder it becomes to roll out the implementation and truly reap its benefits. Also, the ERP implementation needs to be treated as a continuous improvement project as the context will change, and as you acquire more data from your ERP implementation, you will have more opportunities to improve your processes. If you don't share your inventory,...

Send us Fan Mail While evaluating ERP systems, one of the critical choices you will have to make is whether to go for ERP systems that are supported directly by the OEM vs. through partners. In the SMB space, most large vendors support their systems through resellers. But some vendors such as IQMS, QAD, and IFS don't have their channels as developed and support their products primarily throug...

Send us Fan Mail How would you feel if you noticed the availability of your favorite shirt on a website, but when you walked to the store, it wasn't available there. How would you feel if the coupon provided on purchase from the website would not work on a mobile device because of the disconnected loyalty databases? The channels are increasing at an ever-increasing rate, and with that, the co...