RMS - What’s More in Store for Retailers?

Retail management is one of the brightest and most potential industries today, dependent on a variety of aspects—the nature of retailing, product, business environment, customer relationships and more. People expect a more proactive and intuitive shopping experience from retailers, be it online or offline in stores. With online shopping gaining huge momentum in current market, there is a stiff competition among retailers worldwide to attract and retain customers by understanding their varied requirements and personalizing every transaction. Thus increasing the store revenue by improving their rate of customer attraction, conversion and retention are critical challenges posed to retailers.

Retail Management System (RMS) comes as the right solution to retailers that manage both the front-end customer transactions and back-end store operations of a retail business. RMS is a highly sophisticated business management solution for retailers to boost their sales and take business to subsequent levels.

A basic understanding of the retail business is enough to realize that supply chain can make or break companies. Retail management system is a powerful and flexible platform designed for retailers to effectively manage their day-to-day transactions. It helps straddles the entire logistics, accounting, marketing, supply chain also enabling inventory planning at all stocking centers, redistribution centers, vendor sites and points of sale. This in turn enhances business performance and also helps in providing essential insights for making accurate demand and replenishment projections; the net result—more efficient use of resources and higher profitability.

Following are some advanced features of RMS that will help run business more effectively:

Efficient Inventory Tracking

Retail management system provides you with an advantage of raising a well-built inventory system, one that helps you in restocking or dropping critical items as per customer requirements. The system provides an easy access to goods for customers and employees and offers the product price, colour, size, brand details. Tailor made features are available like sale status, pre-labelling status, easy to import items, backorders and more. Thus RMS helps with an easy to use application, eliminating manual entry of data into your accounting software and other applications for report generation and this increases productivity.

Measuring Business Performance

Retail management system helps to store data and generate reports to analyze the data. The system provides custom-made reports as per your unique requirements which help in assessing stock management, business performance, and in business planning. Thus once you configure custom reporting feature in the system to retrieve personalized reports, performance of business is analyzed for an improved planning.

Improving Demand Forecast

Retail businesses run on various promotional offers & trends that vary depending on different seasons. Accordingly retail inventory system helps in making decisions along with a little human expertise. They help you in running your business as per customers’ requirement by predicting accurately the need for various products as per the season.

Analyzing Shortages of Stocks

A retail management system keeps an eye on the stock available in store and the status of shipments to arrive which holds a strong impact on store sales and otherwise will lead to low sales. If products are not available in store at the right time or do not meet the customer’s requirement it may lead to poor customer relationship which affects your customer retention rate. Retail management system clearly lists out and sends alert message to the concerned supervisor about stock availability in the store thus helping retailers maintain the stock in handy.

Distressed Stock in Inventory

Most of the grocery and edible products in the retail industry come with a limited period of time to use. RMS will list out exhaustible products in the inventory that will decompose in nearby expiry date and thus products can be sold soon at the normal price or with special offers before it expires. This helps retailers in avoiding loss from distressed stock and thus saves on your store revenue.

Reducing Cost

Retail management system helps in reducing costs by optimizing order levels, supply patterns and replenishment cycles. RMS minimizes the labour costs by mapping staff to focus on managing and selling products more effectively. This helps in the optimal utilization of resources in store and increasing business productivity and sales.

eCommerce Integration

Integrating your retail management system with online store helps your retail business perform better both online & offline and increase your profits. By integrating, RMS helps retailers manage their transactions on a centralized system where they can easily maintain and improve both online and offline functioning to build strong customer relations.

RMS software synchronizes the products from RMS to online web store seamlessly. It is easy to upload product details to your online store and you can download orders to local system, which in-turn helps you to increase more business with same products and same resources.

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Tips For Successful SharePoint Adoption and Security

SharePoint is the fastest growing product of Microsoft, widespread and used by many of the fortune 500 companies. SharePoint is a tremendous tool with a wide range of capabilities. It addresses high level business analysis to identify problems and opportunities helping businesses improve content collaboration and increase access to business intelligence. It also ensures that strong data security, compliance and auditing processes are all in place. Merely deploying and making it available cannot assure its successful adoption throughout the organization. While its implementation in the corporate world has increased, getting users to adopt SharePoint and sustaining it securely can be challenging. Here are few tips which will help you increase SharePoint adoption in your organization to garner its business benefits.

Analyze Your Requirements

Before deploying SharePoint, it is imperative to look at your company’s objectives, initiatives and goals because SharePoint has a lot of features to suit your specific business requirements. Also look into the current application usability, process and people involved; issues related to them and how SharePoint can fix them for you.

Designed Architecture

Knowing more about SharePoint architecture and how templates can be designed well which involves many content types and navigation, is more important to make your SharePoint environment rich and user-friendly. Many organizations build web pages without proper planning and don’t think of end user accessibility for updating their content. Designing your architecture with proper flow will build an easy access to end users who can take full advantage of all available features. Thus innovative planning and designing of architecture to hold all new features and support your requirements helps users provide quality output.

Plan Your Deployment as per Critical Needs

Rather than installing the complete set of features in SharePoint application to end users, it is better to install critical features as per your specific needs. In general some of the most common features that are needed include document sharing, managing sales, intranets, business intelligence and custom applications accessed through dashboards.

Being Proactive is a Key Strategy

In addition to planning and designing your architecture as per the current business requirements, you also need to proactively think and design template for future requirements and capabilities. Proactive design will help with end user needs for better and lasting system usability.

Your First Run—Start Slowly

It is always better not to do multiple things at once. Start slowly, and devise your deployment gradually over time. For example, you can initially target to a particular group of people or capabilities, focusing on specific issues that people face like managing sales, accounting, business planning or sharing of spreadsheets.

Customize End User Training

Most companies feel that SharePoint is easy to understand and use while in reality it is tricky for the users without proper training. Although there are a lot of training institutes, books, DVDs, online courses and many other ready-made materials available, they usually don’t guide you properly for custom-built features available in your SharePoint application. Companies need to focus on proper business-specific training to their employees on SharePoint before they start using it. Guiding users with how SharePoint can benefit them and how easily it can be accessed will motivate them to embrace the change. Creating few training documents, notes, PPTs of most commonly used tasks and features will all help end users understand the application better.

Security via Permissions Levels

SharePoint security comes via various default levels of permissions. These permission levels are the base of security that can be assigned to groups. Instead of sharing them with individuals, it is better to share them with groups first and later in each group you can add users to make sure about each of their permission levels before providing.

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