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

Send us Fan Mail 48% of customers buy sooner when they have a coupon. And 37% of customers buy more than they normally would. These numbers could be a great tool to drive sales and results. Most people think of coupons as discounts but successfully implementing a good coupon strategy requires far more planning. The coupons require you to identify appropriate distribution channels so they get seen...

Send us Fan Mail Creating consumer products that don't have a pre-existing category is much harder to sell and commercialize than you would think. You have to figure out how to go through procurement, who will probably not be very receptive to your product as they might get beat up by their management. You may also not have enough funding for advertising campaigns to create the kind of buzz a...

Send us Fan Mail Cannabis has become a booming industry, with several states legalizing the use of cannabis in their states. And the industry is also becoming complex with the ever-increasing applications of Cannabis products and their by-products. The companies need to comply with the state requirements, but there might also be additional process overheads due to federal limitations. While the Ca...

Send us Fan Mail Generating demand for new products is super challenging. But the challenges would be at a different level if you had to generate the demand for product categories that didn't exist and if you had to go through procurement. Luckily, today's technologies allow you to target specific roles in a given account, so they can relate with your logo and brand before you visit them...

Send us Fan Mail Open-source is not a term you will hear when it comes to ERP systems. But there are a few open source ERP systems such as Odoo. While their claim of being open-source made them super popular in the development community, are they truly open-source? Well, if you look under the hood, the open-source pitch is really to grab developers' attention as the core component of ERP, suc...

Send us Fan Mail When you start your business, you will do whatever you can in your power to survive. You might sign up any customers that might have any amount of money in their pockets. You might sell an offering that you might not have on your menu. Again, we as entrepreneurs have figured out how to survive. But the same entrepreneurial spirit fires back when you are trying to scale your busine...

Send us Fan Mail While you may get tons of traffic for your e-commerce website, if your users don't find your content interesting, they might not stay on it for very long. And this is where the KPIs around sessions are critical. It will help you understand what's happening after the users land on your pages. It will also help you understand how long they stay on each page and how many pa...

Send us Fan Mail Transportation management has multiple facets, and it could mean different things to different companies. But the real value of a TMS system will be when multimode legs are involved in shipping goods. And that's why the transportation and 3PL companies have greater needs for a TMS system than manufacturing and distribution companies. But if the manufacturing company manages i...

Send us Fan Mail Logistics planning is hard, and it gets harder as the number of incoming and outgoing truckloads grows for a warehouse or manufacturing facility. While yard management is typically an afterthought as its implications may not impact the core operational and financial transactions, you can't ignore it due to the financial hits caused by unused trailer capacity, detention, and d...

Send us Fan Mail The journey of e-commerce could be frightening. In fact, it's kind of confusing because of the blurring line between B2B and B2C. The approach that worked for B2C may not be most appropriate for B2B. There is also a blurring line between whether you want to consider the content-first approach or cart-first. Whatever you consider, you will have significant implications on your...

Send us Fan Mail Most people might recognize Microsoft for Windows or Office applications. They might also recognize them for their database and Azure. But did you know that Microsoft always had a significant market share in the ERP space? While Microsoft's go-to-market strategy has been very different from other ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP, they have always had a lead in the market wi...

Send us Fan Mail Garbage in garbage out is perhaps the most overused phrase of all during the ERP conversations. Everyone uses it, but very few understand the consequences and implications of this phrase. Also, your data, whether structured poorly or diligently, forms the foundation of your business model. But why? Because many data sets are relevant in the ERP conversations, such as master, confi...

Send us Fan Mail Pricing and discounting are two strategies to incentivize buyers to make a purchase decision. But there is always confusion where each would be appropriate. Also, pricing is often a sensitive area where most companies would rather undercharge in fear of losing market share or customers. Companies could use pricing strategies such as cost-plus, competition-based, value-based, price...

Send us Fan Mail The divide between IT and OT has always been challenging for business executives. But this divide has always existed and still exists among other groups too. For example, sales and marketing teams don't like to deal with IT as they are perceived to slow down things. The supply chain doesn't like them either as they would rather manage their systems independently than dea...

Send us Fan Mail Due to the proliferation of IoT devices in manufacturing environments, the number of access points prone to attack has increased significantly. And while the OT environments don't have as thicker the code base as the IT environment, OT environments are less secure than IT. The lack of education in how to write production-ready software and a greater push for efficiency have b...

Send us Fan Mail Scheduling has always been challenging for manufacturing industries, especially for industries such as Automotive, where stopping the assembly line even for a couple of hours could mean the loss of millions of dollars for a company. Some industries also have challenges where the skill matrix could play a huge role in your scheduling as the skills may not be transferrable. If you d...

Send us Fan Mail Epicor is the household name for mid-market manufacturing and distribution companies. Just like Infor, it offers last-mile functionality for manufacturing and distribution companies that may not be available through other enterprise players such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. While Epicor may not be as global a solution as some of their larger competitors, they offer more value to...

Send us Fan Mail The supply chain structure defined in the ERP software must mirror the actual supply chain. But it very rarely does. This issue is even more critical when the organizations may have multiple sites to distribute or manufacture goods. The supply chain professionals often need to plan on spreadsheets to make up for the underlying problems in the ERP configurations and data. While the...

Send us Fan Mail Planning for sales in the traditional world was easy. If you had a retail location, you would plan the right location, inventory, study the neighborhood, and provide the customer service and pricing aligned with the neighborhood's needs. If you were selling through big-box retailers or distributors, you had to hire salespeople qualified to sell to distributors, design their t...

Send us Fan Mail Identifying the appropriate production method requires you to have a deep understanding of your finished products and raw materials consumed. An incorrect production method and its KPIs may have implications on the production capacity. Also, if there is a mismatch in your demand and supply, you might need to understand if there might be a way to increase the capacity. If you are l...

Send us Fan Mail Traditionally most systems used on the shop floor were disconnected. Even if you had multiple systems such as ERP and MES, they didn't have real-time connectivity with the machines. And to get data from these systems, manufacturers created data lakes and powered dashboards using the insights gathered from these lakes. While these dashboards provide visibility into operations...

Send us Fan Mail Edge computing is powerful. It can help companies monitor and maintain distributed assets that would otherwise require significant capital and manpower to manage. In addition, these technologies allow your technicians to control those devices remotely without having to travel. You can also gather tons of insights that can improve the operational performance of these devices and he...

Send us Fan Mail Oracle and SAP are the only two names you will hear in the enterprise accounts while everyone else is trying to claim the third spot, including Microsoft, Infor, and Sage. In fact, you might hear that you are either an SAP shop or an oracle shop in the enterprise community. Oracle also largely dominates the database market, which could be why IT typically champions Oracle applicat...

Send us Fan Mail Utilizing software in a siloed department is super easy. But as your enterprise grows, you will require cross-functional collaboration across departments. You will have systems that share common data, such as inventory or parts, customers, and vendors. Your architecture may contain ERP, E-commerce, WMS, MES, and P2P systems. Each of them is equally important, which may be dictated...

Send us Fan Mail Traditionally, there were a limited number of channels that a company had to manage. But as the lines keep blurring in the business models, businesses will need to manage more channels. The marketplaces and their ever-evolving business model will fuel the growth of channels even further. These marketplaces also pose some of the newer challenges that didn't exist in the tradit...