Cloud 9 ERP Solutions Blog

2020 was a tough year for retailers—at least those with a traditional brick-and mortar footprint. Capacity limitations and a continued push by Amazon left many traditional spaces fighting for their lives. But 2021 is here. Shots are going into arms, lockdowns are being lifted, and the busy seasons are coming up. But to succeed, retail executives will need to have customer information, supply chains, and planning initiatives perfected.

It’s challenging to modernize warehouse operations without a comprehensive plan. After all, the path to failure is laid with good intentions, and failing to plan is planning to fail. For the distribution industry—a sector awash with activity and evolution, many companies are forging new paths with the help of technology.

When looking at the cost, functionality, and time to implement a software, you expect to get everything you want and need. Part of any successful software decision journey is the process of defining needs, prioritizing functionality, and building your list of potential vendors to deliver on your expectations.

“Ghosting” is one of those terms in modern dating used to explain what happens when a potential love interest simply… vanishes. Things can be going swimmingly for weeks, you think that the two of you are on the same page, and then, one day, nothing.

Constant improvement is the goal of any company. But for software vendors, it’s the number one goal. Customers don’t just rely on their software vendors to provide more functionality and usability, they require it.

2020 changed the way that product-based businesses needed to work. Whether the change impacted a traditionally bricks-and-mortar retailer looking for opportunities to undo the damage of lockdowns, a distributor seeing increased pressure to embrace technology, or a manufacturer looking to pivot, many players in each of these industries turned to ecommerce to keep the money flowing in.

In our last blog exploring the role of an ERP partner in helping you through your ERP selection and implementation journey, we highlighted the importance of communication and needs documentation, noting that this is a critical step not only for getting the right functionality, but in driving excitement for a project.

ERP is like surgery, and if you're going to approach anything as complicated and process-based as this, you're going to want to understand what the surgeon is going to do between the anesthesia and sewing up.

2020 was, in a word, unprecedented. Combine pandemic-driven lockdowns, recession, and an election thrown in for good measure all combined to make for an interesting time. And with all the uncertainty that the year brought, change was an imperative. From state governments limiting or restricting capacity in stores to increased safety measures, evolving customer expectations, and challenges in the supply chain, retailers needed to turn on a dime to keep up.

Every distributor is different. Different products, different suppliers, and different locations—all scientifically chosen to maintain margins, improve delivery speed, and ultimately ensure that the supply chain remains in a state of flow. But there’s another area in which they are different as well—technological maturity, risk tolerance and goals. In turn, this leads to distributors living in different realities, existing in different stages of their warehouse modernization journey.