ChannelAdvisor Catalyst 2012

Jonathan Bellwood — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:54:44 +0000

Metapack Home Delivery Conference 2012

Oliver Rhodes — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:06:00 +0000

Comprehensive review of the Metapack Home Delivery Conference 2012 and Sir Terry Leahy’s speech.

Last year my colleague Jonathan Bellwood attended the Metapack Home Delivery Conference (read his review from 2011 here). This year I was delighted to be invited and here is my review of the most interesting parts.

Royal Mail kicked off proceedings this year with a stat attack:

Online shoppers that have been shopping online for more than 7 years spend £1,600 a year on average. If people become more valuable online over time, how can we drive loyalty over Client acquisition? Rapidly growing companies are often guilty of forgetting about their existing customers.

Online shoppers are 47% more likely to buy when they know who the carrier is. State your carriers upfront on your website to increase conversion.

Returns discussed, with women the worst offenders sending back 42% of clothes items. This does not shock me.

My thoughts:

Returns, how can we improve how we handle them? My take is that RMA’s (returns material authorisation forms) are out of date, a nightmare for customers and do not comply with one of the top 3 reasons customers shop online, “convenience”. Send me a returns label and YOU the retailer should worry about the rest.

Find out how PeopleVox’s sofware can help Metapack customers

DPD brought the WOW! factor. Interactive services to help customers to predict the one hour delivery window. Their research has shown that cost is the limiting factor in our willingness to use text messages to organise first time delivery. They were prepared to eat £500,000 worth of text messaging cost in 2012 on behalf of customers to increase first time delivery success rate.

Sameday delivery. One obvious solution, one a bit left-field.

The obvious: City Sprint are the only wholly owned same day delivery network. They are seeing growth in ‘twilight’ deliveries between 18:00-22:00 AKA when we are at home. If your average basket size is over £50 this may be worth considering.

The innovative: “Think of Shutl as Paypal for same day deliveries”

Shutl are a technology company, not a delivery company. They aggregate quotes from multiple same day delivery couriers, to give you same day delivery for the same price if not lower than standard delivery. How?

Couriers’ bids are determined by their service level which is built entirely from their customer reviews. Every customer review is posted onto Shutl’s live twitter feed. Transparency and trust are key to growth and Shutl is eating both for breakfast.

GPS courier tracking that retailers can white label let you watch your order progress live.

Their customers are delighted and they are proven to increase conversion. Worth a discussion?

My thoughts:

It is clear that carriers can deliver same day. But what about the bit that happens between when the order is placed to when it is picked up?

Central distribution centres that serve retail stores are not able to meet this demand with their existing warehouse technology.

Same day is undoubtedly the future and the carriers are ready but is your eCommerce fulfilment?

ByBox use lockers at train stations and in other public places to receive your deliveries. You can then pick them up at YOUR convenience. End result: Never miss a delivery.

I personally like the ByBox concept because I know that when I go to collect a parcel I will not have to wait.

Find out how PeopleVox’s sofware benefits Metapack customers

The game changer: Send your customers more than they ordered and give them the option to buy at the collection point. The ultimate upsell.

We mentioned Collect+ in our review of last year and were pleased to see that they were back. They are adding 100 new pick up and return points each month on average.

It works and they are only getting better and better. We wondered not so long ago if eCommerce collect and return would fly? Question answered me thinks.

Accenture gave the room plenty of food for thought.

1. Online customers expectations continue to rise.

2. They are increasingly savvy with 72% using price comparison websites.

3. Competition online continues to intensify.

The reality: Retailers need to work harder to remain the same, let alone achieve supersonic growth online.

My top 5 takeaways from Accenture’s presentation:

1. Real-time order information is the ‘norm’. Customers need to be kept informed from the moment they click buy, the order is confirmed, the order is picked, the order is despatched, the order is out for delivery.

Result = Reduce customer service calls related to order status.

2. Inventory must be visible to the customer and the inventory accuracy needs to be higher than traditional retail.

When customers order online your brand is guaranteeing your customer that the item they have ordered will be delivered when they want it.

3. The old way of processing returns isn’t good enough.

Returns are increasing and they need to be processed rapidly. They can no longer fester like they do back from stores.

They need to be received reconciled and refunds arranged based on the information transferred from your warehouse.

More importantly, good stock needs to be back online and available for re-sale ASAP.

4. The warehouse is the core competency in eCommerce. Retailers need to make decisions on how to best focus their assets.

How can they leverage existing retail stores to pick web orders? Can existing warehouse layout and technology be adapted to cope? Do they need to create a dedicated eCommerce warehouse to meet their customer expectation?

5. Execution for customer experience.

How can we deliver our customers the offline convenience when they shop online. This is really the key to differentiating with superior service in eCommerce. Up to minute stock statuses are key to this.

Find out how PeopleVox’s sofware saves Metapack customers money

Accenture conclusion: Change needs innovation in fulfilment for service differentiation. Companies need to revisit their structure, technology and execution to replicate high-street success.

John Lewis – Online customer service

John Lewis are focusing on keeping customers up to date on order progress and giving proactive information on fulfilment exceptions. The aim is to engage customers to increase satisfaction.

Part of this has involved managing expectation e.g. A green van will not be delivering your order.

They have also focused on single SKU (stock keeping unit) locations to minimise orders being split between distribution centres. Split orders = double shipping costs = less gross margin.

Key customer service KPI’s (key performance indicators) they recommend include number of inbound calls, complaints and number of emails received.

Sir Terry Leahy – Metapack shareholder and former Tesco head honcho

Sir Terry Leahy sees complex business challenges in a simple way. His advice for companies seeking growth reflected this and he looks to 6 key factors:

1. Trust. The online world is more and more about being transparent (see Shutl above). The growth of ratings review sites like Trustpilot are proof of this. They are even proven to increase conversion.

2. Information. We are undergoing a digital revolution and eCommerce customers are at the forefront of this. They tweet, facebook and are hungry for information.

3. Health and beauty. “We all want to live for ever and look amazing.” eCommerce businesses serving these sectors are the next big bet.

4. Simple. Keep customer experience simple and satisfying.

5. Loyalty. Loyal customers spend more, complain less and are more profitable than disloyal customers. Too many customers focus on acquisition for growth and do not look after their existing. How many eCommerce businesses can be charged as guilty of this?

6. Green. In the future if you are not green you will not be able to grow.

Sir Terry Leahy likened eCommerce today to supermarket expansion 15 – 20 years ago. The big impressive malls too often had too many empty shelves and out of date stock.

The turning point for the supermarkets was to invest in central distribution centres, “re-organising the plumbing” as he put it.

Find out how PeopleVox’s sofware can help Metapack customers

“eCommerce today has a great front-end, but does not have the distribution, delivery management and fulfilment to back it up.

Online fulfilment is at this moment in time highly inefficient, but what we need to recognise is that once these systems are in place to support it, the potential for international growth is unprecedented.

“When is the turning point in growth at which your old systems need to be changed?” The reality being that you only know something was a turning point afterwards.

My thoughts:

This is my first experience of Sir Terry Leahy and I enjoyed listening to what he had to say. The challenge for retailers listening is to then act. These are the questions that need to be asked at board level in the top high-street and online retailers.

How can we increase customer loyalty?

How can we reorganise our systems?

How can we meet these rising customer expecations?

Author: Oliver Rhodes

Android inventory software for warehouse management

Oliver Rhodes — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:25:15 +0000

Android inventory software in the warehouse interests us…web-based inventory software for warehouse management is what we do!

iPhone warehouse management available now

If you own your ecommerce company, then you are likely to be looking to keep track of all that money you have tied up in stock. Using inventory software enables you to know exactly what stock is where. With a low cost Android device and low monthly software rental, suddenly you can play against the big guys, just like you do with a snazzy web site.

Earlier this year I wrote about iPhone inventory management. Business owners are driving interest in using Apple devices but we thought that an iPhone was not the most suitable for using in the warehouse. This is why:

1. Too desirable, so would be stolen

2. Barcode scanner does not scan fast enough

3. Battery life too short

4. Inventory software has to be distributed through app centre and pay money to Apple

5. Not tough enough so breaks when dropped

Conclusion: We need a device that is rugged, low cost, and relatively undesirable, on a semi open software platform that lasts an 8-10 hour shift or has a battery you can swap out.

Earlier this year Motorola Solutions released the Motorola ES400 ‘Enterprise Digital Assistant’ AKA entry-level mobile computer and demand has been high. Close to our dream inventory software device but no dedicated, speedy barcode scanner and NOT LOW COST ENOUGH!

Then…Google buys Motorola for $12.5 billion (the mobile phone bit that is).

We are hoping that Motorola Solutions will be planning to tie up with Motorola Mobility and Google to make the switch to Android. Removing the Windows operating system will bring down the cost of producing warehouse management devices and boost their sales.

So Motorola Solutions, it is time to follow your mobile phone making brother over to the Android alliance because if you do not we will have to make a move.

Most likely this will involve taking the myriad of Google Android devices that we currently have to choose from and using barcode scanner attachments and rugged cases to plug the gap…Android inventory software for warehouse management is coming whether the devices are ready or not.

Author: Oliver Rhodes

Warehouse Systems Pay Dividends At Christmas

Oliver Rhodes — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:26:56 +0000

Online retailers are beginning to gear up for this year’s Christmas shopping. Most will be expecting to be picking, packing and shipping more orders than ever before and it will fall on the warehouse fulfilment team and warehouse systems to bear the load. For most, this will mean hiring more warehouse workers.

Third-party logistics companies that do the e-commerce fulfilment on behalf of companies like Boots and John Lewis have to take on thousands of temporary workers to help them increase their e-commerce warehouse fulfilment capacity.

So how do they manage? Well they have training academies and expensive systems in place which mean new workers can come in off the street and be up and running in a complicated warehouse in days.

But what for the online retailers who are doing it for themselves?

Well for a starter the challenges that arise from temporary warehouse workers are exacerbated for smaller online retailers with 2-25 people in their warehouse.

Most will have little if any formal warehouse training in place.

Systems and processes are often overly complex which means they require a certain amount of memory and skill to master.

Finding the labour isn’t always straightforward. Many online retailers that I deal with are set up in remote parts of the country so getting people to them can be a challenge.

Temporary labour let loose in your warehouse at such a crucial time of the year is a potentially brand and reputation damaging combination.

The peaks in sales are when the investments that you make in your processes and warehouse systems will really pay off.

Just as third-party logistics companies have done, investing in warehouse systems that help to guide best practice is paying dividends for the top online retailers.

Mispicks and mis-shipments result in disappointed customers. Whilst your regular warehouse team may be sharp to the errors that can occur, your temporary staff will not be (and often don’t care anyway). A warehouse system means that even if they are liable to making mistakes there is a safety net in place to save your blushes.

Whilst your temporary warehouse staff may be able to get orders out the door, if they have been making mistakes the e-commerce returns will stack up fast.

By removing unnecessary processes, you are able to reallocate warehouse staff to more productive tasks. For example, using automatic data capture to ensure that the right items are picked first time allows you to remove the double-checking of sales orders at the packing bench.

What we are seeing is that if online retailer is big enough to be investing in extra warehouse workers and feeling these growing pains in order to meet the spikes in demand then they can equally make a case for investing in their warehouse systems.

Author: Oliver Rhodes

How To Avoid Same RIM Inventory Problems Fate

Jonathan Bellwood — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:10:54 +0000

Ouch. According to the Guardian newspaper in the UK, RIM, Research in Motion, apparently has inventory of $216m of its Playbooks and is having trouble shifting them.

How could RIM get it so wrong? I immediately think of our ecommerce customers and their inventory. Are they less at risk because they sell the majority of their products directly to consumers via the web? Even if not, how can they prevent the same inventory problems occurring which can cripple cash flow?

1. By selling direct to consumers via the web, you have accurate sales data. RIM sells a great deal through channels and retailers, so it can be tricky to know if what they shipped has actually been sold on to end users. So having the accurate sales data daily from your web site sales, most orders of which are received and fulfilled immediately, I have my finger on the trend pulse.

2. Inventory levels change daily when selling via a web site. Having live inventory to the second, again to know trends of the different types of products also helps prevent inventory problems, including the case where you run out of stock. To have this live inventory, you need to be allocating at the point of order, scanning the barcodes on items during inventory picking as they are picked in your warehouse and when they are despatched. This will give you an accurate stock audit, especially when combined with scanning the product barcodes to ensure you are picking the correct items.

3. Knowing your slow moving items enables ecommerce companies to discount to rotate it out of their operation freeing up cash. To prevent inventory problems on certain products, you should have a target number of stock turns per year for different product categories specified in your inventory control software. Maybe RIM should do this like HP recently did with their tablet to clear their inventory, as everybody loves a bargain. Let’s wait and see.

Author: Jonathan Bellwood

Bye bye expiry on pie

Jonathan Bellwood — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:29:54 +0000

We’ve all seen items on the clearance shelf in the supermarket. They are expiring that day. The retailer wants rid of them at any price. If not, they will only be binned.

DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has said the ‘sell by’ and ‘display until’ markings on items will be phased out. It is estimated that £12bn will be saved by not throwing away safe to eat food. It has not said whether this is annually or over a longer period.

For those retailers who up to now have had food inventory software to manage this issue, their life will get even easier as they will simply have less products to manage via their traceability software and less fines for having out of date products on their shelves. They will also mark down less items which should help them maintain their standard pricing for longer plus free up their staff to doing more useful tasks.

In fact, we can only see benefit in this change in legislation and as a consumer I am still going to rely on smelling it first rather than obsessing about any dates printed on the packaging.

Author: Jonathan Bellwood

Looting and inventory records

Jonathan Bellwood — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:30:14 +0000

If you are one of the unlucky people to have had your business stripped by the hooligans in London in the past few days, you may have lost many of your assets and inventory. How can you then prove to your insurance company that your inventory records are accurate?

The reality is that the aftermath can be just as bad when making an insurance claim, as we know how much they dislike paying out. Without firm inventory records stored off site of what you had that day, your claim will be even trickier. Paper records are commonly used in businesses for simple asset management, or an excel spreadsheet that was on the computer in the burnt out or cleared out office. I wrote previously about inventory theft and damaged inventory, but never took into account such a mess appearing in western civilisation.

Those that have the electronic inventory records off site in a software system should be fine. However those businesses that did not invest in an asset management and inventory system will regret it as they spend hours to argue with the insurance company, not forgetting the emotional drain of seeing a company handed down through many generations go up in smoke.

The bottom line is that for a small monthly fee, businesses can get asset management software to maintain inventory records in case of an unplanned event. These events were certainly unforeseen.

Author: Jonathan Bellwood

Brightpearl open day 2011 review by PeopleVox

Oliver Rhodes — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:29:18 +0000

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to jump on the train West to sunny Bristol and spend a day with the people behind Brightpearl and some of their most valued Clients

For those of you that don’t know, Brightpearl is web based business management software to handle CRM, Accounting, Sales, Invoicing, Stock/Inventory (not the barcoding bit) and Websites.

Reassuringly complicated

I arrived fashionably late and entered as one of Brightpearl’s technical wizards was explaining what sits ‘under the hood’ of their system.

The content was ‘technical’ and although I must admit that I was left feeling slightly bamboozled, I did get a key takeaway:

The Brightpearl system is hosted on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) .

What this means is:

Brightpearl can add new instances to the system very quickly
They have a technical structure that is capable of rapid expansion

Salman Malik , CEO of Brightpearl, described how the Amazon cloud had coped with the rapid growth of a web application – Animoto.

Animoto takes users images, videos and music and turns them into a movie-style trailer. In March 2008, Animoto launched a Facebook application.

In April 2008, Animoto had 750,000 new sign-ups in three days with almost 25,000 people using Animoto every hour. It has since gone on to become one of Amazon’s cloud computing success stories, Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) even mentioned Animoto when giving a speech on Amazon’s Web Services.

Amazon’s ability to cope with this speed of growth is what makes it the platform of choice for software-as-a-service providers like Brightpearl and PeopleVox. Complicated technical content, but reassuringly so .

Streamlining warehouse and distribution processes

A quick show of hands confirmed that for the majority of Brightpearl Clients, what goes on in the warehouse is important to the success of their business.

There were quite a few online retailers in the room who had decided to run their own warehouses. One Client said that the had tried to get suppliers to drop-ship on their behalf but they could not get them to work to their standards.

This mirrors the trend that I have been observing over the last 6 months, online retailers are *winning* by retaining complete control of their own warehouse and fulfilment. Reputation and customer satisfaction depend on efficient fulfilment.

A big difference between running your own warehouse and using a 3rd party fulfilment centre is how you are able to respond when things don’t go to plan. Being able to trust that you picked, packed and shipped the right thing can give you a real edge over your competitors when it comes to customer service.

Enter stage left…PeopleVox (more specifically – me!)

“PeopleVox provide a web-based inventory management software that can help you to make your warehouse more efficient…barcode scanning to make sure you pick the right thing…integration to carriers…PeopleVox compliments Brightpearl exceptionally well if you are running a busy warehouse operation.”

“Our number one priority is making our software easy to use”

“We are very excited to be teaming up with Brightpearl!”

It was a real pleasure to catch up with some of Brightpearl’s Clients, to hear about their warehousing challenges and understanding how we might be able to help their businesses.

Selling online!

The growth of ecommerce sales was not being ignored by Brightpearl’s customers. Most are selling via multiple online sales channels too. I heard Amazon, Ebay and Etsy being mentioned.

Integration with these various platforms to manage stock was discussed, Amazon seemed the most popular.

One business owner had an interesting perspective on Ebay, “Our Ebay customers are completely different to our main website’s customers.” Different sales channels will broaden your reach and will ultimately drive traffic back to your main website (where you don’t have to pay anyone fees).

One Client described a situation where he had got into a spot of bother regarding return handling terms and conditions when selling via Amazon. Sometimes the T&C’s of the sales channel can supersede your own.

A word of warning then; always read the T&C’s for any sales channel that you use. For this Brightpearl Client it had meant a legal case to defend his right to not take a return on a very bespoke item.

Thank you to everyone at Brightpearl

It was a very enjoyable day and my first real step into the Brightpearl and PeopleVox partnership. A big thank you to everyone at Brightpearl, they really are very good at hosting

A final thank you to Jean Pierre Hourlier of Hourlier Wines who provided the wine tasting, well worth checking out his website if you are into French wines.

How to reset Zebra ZM400 printer

Oliver Rhodes — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:33:53 +0000

The steps to calibrate the Zebra ZM400 barcode label printer are:

Turn off the Zebra ZM400 printer (the switch is on the back of the printer).
Press and hold the ‘Pause’ button and ‘Feed’ button together.
Whilst holding both the buttons, switch the printer back on.
Release the buttons, few seconds after the printer is switched on.

Click here to see the video guide on how to do this calibration of the Zebra ZM400.

If you need help installing barcode printer labels and ribbons on your Zebra ZM400, see help video in related articles.

Author: Thulasee Shan

Barcode system implementations on the rise to stops humans making mistakes.

Jonathan Bellwood — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 06:20:48 +0000

“Mistakes show us what needs improving. Without mistakes, how would we know what we had to work on?”

If you work in a warehouse without a barcode system you know where mistakes happen and it is likely you have already made steps to prevent them.

A prime example of this is in preventing order picking mistakes. Take a look at this scenario:

John, the Warehouse Manager, gives his warehouse team the order ‘picking lists’ with a description of what to pick, the quantity required and possibly the item locations.

Despite this, John knows that sometimes people go to pick items and end up with the right product type but in the wrong colour, size or specification.

To counter this he has told his warehouse staff that before any sales order is packed, it needs to be double checked by a different warehouse worker and signed off.

Extra warehouse labour is now being used to increase order picking accuracy but packing has been slowed down. Most mispicks are now picked up and re-picked, but this also takes extra resources.

The reason the mispicks were happening has remained and sometimes the wrong thing is still being shipped.

John has already thrown an extra human at the warehouse process to try and improve it, so what next?

The reality is that to the human eye two things can look the same and us humans make mistakes. FACT.

A barcode system will remove human error from the order picking process, fixing John’s problem and helping him to free up resources by removing the routine quality checks at packing. Here is how:

1. You can not pick the wrong thing with a barcode system

A barcode system will take the information that is printed onto the picking lists and show it on a rugged handheld computer screen.

Firstly, when the order pickers go to pick an item they scan the location to confirm they are in the right place.

Secondly, they scan the item that they are being asked to pick. The barcode system verifies that the barcode scanned matches the pick list item. If the wrong product is scanned the order picker is alerted and told to try again.

With a barcode scan you can not pick the wrong product, assuming that items are correctly labelled.

2. The right thing has been picked first time

Because the right thing has been picked first time, items can go straight into packing and wrapping, ready to be shipped.

A barcode system can enable smaller teams that do not have dedicated pickers and packers to work more quickly without compromising accuracy. The same person who picks can pack, as you can be 99.99% confident that the right thing is being picked first time.

3. Random spot-checks, not routine quality checks

Still keep doing those random spot-checks; a barcode system may be very easy to use but remember it still has a human at the controls.

When i meet warehouse managers, we benchmark against 1 mis-pick in every 10,000 when using a barcode system. This is a realistic target for warehouses that put in a barcode system.

Summary

Human mistakes are inevitable.

A barcode system is an excellent way to automate order picking and other warehouse processes to remove the margin for human error.

Author: Oliver Rhodes