Metro Gaisano partners with Vinculum to accelerate its growth

All about Metro:

Founded by Victor and Sally Gaisano from Cebu in 1982, Metro Retail has been a leading retail chain for 33 years.

With three formats—department store, supermarket, and hypermart, the homegrown retail firm has 47 stores with over 9,000 employees and foot traffic of over 250,000 shoppers daily.

It is the largest department store and hypermarket in terms of retail value sales in Visayas, Philippines, and is among the top three retailers in the Philippines.

Key Challenges:

Metro owns and operates a chain of departmental stores, supermarkets, furniture stores, DIY stores, and convenience stores. With multiple data systems and sources, there were inconsistencies and redundancies in their customer and product data.

The retailer needed a solution that could:

• Process, clean and classify millions of records.
• Reduce obsolete, inconsistent and redundant information
• Manage multiple data from different sources and systems
• Increase efficiency of processes for timely execution
• Automate supplier registrations

The Vinculum Solution:

Vinculum’s high-performance Master Data Management solution, Vin MDM, helped Metro identify more than 35% of obsolete data. We worked with the retailer to deliver –

• IT strategy and roadmap to enhance its infrastructure
• Identification of 35% of duplicate and inaccurate data
• Processing, cleansing and classification of millions of records in minutes
• 54% reduction of item records
• Improvement of process orchestration
• 360-degree visibility of master information
• Enablement of users to take on data processing and synchronization

Additionally, our implementation provided them with an IT strategy and a roadmap to enhance their infrastructure and systems to meet current and future needs.

The road ahead:

Currently, the retail group is pouring in P10 billion to double the size of its network in the next five years. They plan to increase the network of their stores to 800,000 square meters in terms of gross floor area.

So far, the company has already secured about 40 percent of the target, which will open in the next two years.

Read the complete story of how we helped Metro here.

 Any tips or questions for us? Leave them in the comments below.

PIM for Retailers: Manage your data like Walmart!

So says Ram Rampalli, global head of content acquisition at Walmart.

And with good reason. Customers today expect comprehensive, accurate and up to date information about the brands and goods they purchase.

If you’re a retailer – you know that this is easier said than done.

Streamlining information involves managing various sets of data – data received from suppliers, manufacturers, and brands. Adding to the fray is the growing volume of products being carried by all the players in the retail mix.

As per Forrester Research, customers not only expect to view in-store inventory online, but a whopping 39% of them wouldn’t even visit a store without online in-store inventory information –

If high-quality, relevant and consistent data is so important to your customers; wouldn’t it also matter to you? Higher quality product information would allow you to:

• Manage your inventory and returns better
• Manage your costs better
• Cross sell and up sell to customers
• Overall, offer a better experience to your shoppers.

So, how do you achieve great product data quality?

These are the 5 things your software must absolutely do, to achieve this kind of success with the product data:

Standardize data:
The software should help your data comply with industry standards. It should help you maintain compliance with internal and global standards such as GS1, EAN, UPC, SKU, etc.

Last year, for instance, Walmart rolled out a new ‘Product Content Collection System’ to enable its suppliers to provide data in a particular framework, so as to collect all product attributes, protocols, etc.

Benefit – When all your stakeholders in the supply chain have data in the same format, it helps the retailer (you) manage your sellers and vendors better – getting rid of bottlenecks in the chain of business.

Cleanse your data:
Your customers want to have valid, correct data.

Walmart has solutions in place that remove their erroneous and obsolete data should be removed from systems. Post this, the information is merged to create single records, and present a simple, clean, single view to the end user.

Benefit – Your business will benefit from reduced data storage costs since you will not be storing redundant data. This will help you optimize your business operations.

Validate your data:

Before publishing the information at various sales channels, a retailer needs to ensure that his software validates or governs the quality of data.

This can be done by defining validation rules and appointing stewards who are responsible for approval of all data.  For instance, whenever a new user enters a new data record, a consolidated check is performed to validate the record.

All of this can be enabled via software – Product Information Management Software.

Benefit – A lost sale isn’t the only negative outcome of bad product data. As many aggrieved retailers know, there’s also the risk of losing a loyal customer, or worse, reputation damage.

A study carried out by GS1 estimates bad data costs organizations between 10 and 25 percent of their total revenue. For example, this means $ 675 million for grocery retailers alone. 

Integrate your data:
The system should have integration capabilities to bring together data – structured, semi-structured or unstructured, from different data sources like the ERP systems, data pools, etc.

It creates a single view of data, which can be accessed through all the links in the supply chain – making it easier for you to coordinate between sales channels. With integrated data – as is the case with Walmart – managing inventory and returns becomes much easier, as all sales channels – online, offline, mobile, etc. become unified.

Benefit – You can now see clearly, what your inventory levels are, what returns are due, which medium they belong to, etc. This will help you bring down the cost of returns, and optimize inventory levels.

Are you a retailer?
PIM solutions can help you manage, cleanse, integrate, validate and standardize your data like Walmart!  How? Find out more here.

Vinculum featured in Gartner’s Market Guide for MDM of Product Data Solutions

One of the world’s leading IT research and advisory firms, Gartner has just released its Market Guide for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions for 2016. According to Gartner, the requirement for multiple master data domains has more than quadrupled from 3% to 14% overall, in 2015 – a trend that they continue to see in 2016.

Organizations that aim to create a single, trusted view of product data seek MDM packaged solutions that address the product data domain. The report lists software vendors that organizations should consider to enable Digital commerce & features Vinculum as a Marketplace & Multichannel Integration Platform.

Vinculum has been a regular feature in Gartner’s global reports on the Retail Industry.

Earlier, Vinculum was recognized as:

• VIN eRetail (Vinculum’s SaaS based Order/Distributed Order Management Suite) was recognized as one of the global DOM (Distributed Order Management) software providers in Gartner’s Market Guide for DOM systems.
• In 2015, Gartner’s Market guide for Warehousing and Fulfillment Application Vendors featured Vin eRetail WMS (eCommerce Order Fulfillment & Warehouse Management system on cloud).
• Previously, Vinculum’s Vin MDM (Master Data Management solution) & Vin PIM (Product Information management system enabling consistent product information across channels) have been mentioned in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for product and customer data solutions in 2012, 2014, and 2015.

Vinculum’s SaaS-based solutions offer rapid implementation. A de-coupled platform, it can be implemented both as independent module/s and as a complete suite. Their products are easily deployable in and adaptable to the client’s existing tech infrastructure at a lower TCO as compared to traditional enterprise offerings.

Vin PIM, for marketplaces enables seamless, consistent product information across multiple channels. It allows online marketplaces to manage data hierarchies, styles and variants, de-duplicatication, as well as empower data governance and stewardship.

PIM allows retailers to standardize,cleanse, integrate, validate, enrich and manage product data effectively.

Request a demo today.

What is Master Data Management, and Why do you need it?

What is Master Data?

At the very basic level, Master Data Management (MDM) eliminates redundant and inconsistent versions of the same data in your organization.

Organizations believe that over 27% of their revenue is wasted due to inaccurate master data.*

Information about your customers, products, and sellers and the relationships between them – all constitutes master data.

Why is Master Data Management important?

Companies today struggle to become agiler by implementing information systems that support and facilitate changing business requirements. As a result, the management of information about products, customers, etc. has become increasingly important.

Consider, for instance, the fact that most companies estimate that they are analyzing only 12% of their  data. These firms could be missing out on the data-driven insights inside of 88% of data that they’re ignoring.*

Additionally, organizations have some system in place to store and retrieve this data. However, many disparate systems store information, which leads to overlapping, redundant and inconsistent data.

For e.g., The definitions of common terms such as ‘supplier’, ‘vendor’ may differ across systems. Different systems are likely to have different rules for data validation and cleansing, etc. Such differences make it difficult for a business to achieve consistent, complete and relevant master data.

This gives rise to an important question –

Where do users go to get valid, accurate, consistent data?

A single word answer? MDM.

Master Data Management (MDM) helps you –

• Provide Seamless Information Across Multiple Channels – Accurate product data is critical to differentiate your business and provide customers with a dynamic and personalized shopping experience. PIM (Product Information Management) helps businesses manage product data from multiple sources. It creates a master catalog of validated, high-quality unique product data for efficient distribution to all sales channels, whether data is structured or unstructured.

• Help Understand Your Customer Better –Customer Data Management helps organizations maintain a single view of all customer data. It synchronizes customer information across systems and the organization’s information supply chain.

• Get A Unified View Of Your Masters – MDM software helps create reliable views to  drive operations efficiently with a complete view of all your data assets. It enables the creation of an integrated view of products, customers, suppliers, materials and other data sets. This data currently may reside in silos with different departments and units.

• Increase Trust In Your Data – Businesses need to rely on high-quality data for quality decision making. Poor quality data can have negative effects on customer relationships, business decision making, and forecasting.

• Connect Everything & Anything – With business information residing in multiple systems and in multiple formats, information users have to duplicate efforts by going through information from multiple systems and combining data together. MDM’s Data integration tool helps to combine data with multiple formats attributes from disparate data sources. It delivers a single unified view of all your data instead of data in silos.

• Be Accountable For Your Data – Easily govern your organizational data for accuracy and accountability with MDG (Master Data Governance) solution.Data Governance brings business users in implementation lifecycle and provides an effective mechanism to manage and author data.

  *Forrester Research

MDM Solutions can help manage your data to deliver an optimized experience to your end customers – and grow your business.  Request a demo today.

 Any tips or comments for us? Leave them in the section below.

Collectabilia turbocharges its eCommerce journey with Vinculum

All about Collectabilia:

Incorporated in 2011, Collectabilia is India’s first celebrity commerce company. It is an online brand that aims to cater to an untapped sports and entertainment ecosystem in India and is every sporting enthusiast’s dream.

It offers opportunities to fans to own memorabilia personally autographed by their icons, and assists celebrities with extending their brand connect beyond endorsements.

Key Challenges:

The eCommerce venture by Deccan Chronicles Holdings Ltd. is a website for sports enthusiasts across the globe, where they can bid for memorabilia items online and also buy team merchandise related to sports like cricket, football, and tennis.

The eTailer collaborated with Vinculum to –

• Streamline their warehousing, to keep track of inventory and maintain optimum inventory levels
• Develop their merchandising system
• Handle returns
• Maintain accurate records
• Automate order processing
• Improve their order fulfillment times

The Vinculum Solution:

Vin eRetail solution, our end to end retail suite helped Collectabilia attain greater productivity levels, reduce inefficiencies and scale up its operations. It delivered the following –

• Set-up the business processes for the various business functions and trained the business users
• Implemented Master Management modules for business functions like tax management, merchandising management, vendor and Customer management and user management, etc.
• Set-up the warehouse system at Aramex premises and implemented the WMS and inventory management modules PO creation, and PO revision.
• Implemented Returns and Work Order management functionalities. This ensured accurate returns management and tracking.
• Real-time end to end inventory visibility to keep a check on inventory levels.

Additionally, Vin eRetail was integrated with 3rd party systems such as front-end website and Aramex.

The implementation of our solution automated their operations. This reduced their order fulfillment cycles, increasing efficiency for the online retailer.

The road ahead:

As a company that encourages the collection of sports memorabilia for personal joy or as a strong investment proposition, the eTailer aims to expand. Collectabillia aims to extend the global market of memorabilia into India, facilitating the ownership of personalized merchandise along the same lines as that of art.

Read the complete story of how we helped Collectabilia here.

 Any tips or questions for us? Leave them in the comments below.

Clik2Buy collaborates with Vinculum to power its eCommerce journey

Clik2Buy is a leading online store in the UAE which offers latest products at affordable prices.

They aim to be a one-stop-shop for all gadgets and lifestyle needs in the region.

With over 5000+ products in their catalog, they are committed to being the most favored online shopping site for electronic accessories within UAE.

Our Engagement:

Vinculum is partnering with Clik2Buy to streamline its order management and fulfillment processes with their end-to-end retail suite, Vin eRetail.

Vin eRetail’s in-built integrations with leading online marketplaces in the Middle East also helped Clik2Buy add new revenue streams to its business.

Keep watching this space for updates on this story.

Any tips or comments for us?  Let us know in the comments below.

IRF 2016: Vinculum explores Opportunities in the O2O Continuum

Catch us at IRF 2016!

Vinculum Group, a leading cloud-based order management, and fulfillment solutions company will be participating at the India Retail Forum 2016 (Booth BR14), to be held on 21^st and 22^nd September at The Renaissance Convention Centre, Mumbai, India.

One of the foremost events in the country for the retail and eCommerce industry, the IRF is a two-day conference held annually, that is aimed at bringing together all entrepreneurs looking to optimize their eCommerce operations and share insights about their businesses.

The rise of the online channel has pushed the entire retail industry to innovate and think of novel ways to attract and retain customers. From the customer’s point of view, the convenience of online retailing is attractive, but physical stores continue to have strong appeal. This poses a great challenge for retailers on how to provide an Omnichannel experience that is personalized but not intrusive.

Get deeper insights into the implementation roadmap for integrating your channels to go Omnichannel at the Thought Leadership Conclave powered by Vinculum at the event on 22^nd Sept 2016 from 15:15 – 16:30 hrs.

The company invites Retailers, eTailers, Online Marketplaces, Sellers on Marketplaces, 3PLs and CPG companies to meet up and discuss how they can work together to identify new revenue streams via multiple sales channels at Booth BR14 at the event.

21-22 September 2016
Booth BR14
IRF 2016

Key Discussion Points:

• Offline to Online Strategy
• Online to Offline Strategy
• The O2O Transformation
• Current IT Landscape and its challenges
• Latest trends transforming the eCommerce ecosystem

Any tips or comments for us? Leave them in the section below – 

Proyog partners with Vinculum to promote ‘Authentic Yoga’

Yoga has been practiced for more than 3,000 years and is rooted in the aim to bring its practitioners’ bodies and minds into harmony with the universe. Today, more and more people are turning to this ancient practice.

Estimates say that over 200 million people around the world practice yoga. The US market for yoga is pegged at around USD 26 billion. The world market for yoga is closer to USD 80 billion.

Bengaluru-based Proyog is a company intent on demonstrating to the world, India’s ability to design and manufacture best-in-class products for the practice of yoga. The world’s first authentic Yogawear brand, Proyog offers fabrics which are non-restrictive and styled in a manner that the practitioner is barely conscious of its presence.

Launched in 2015 on the occasion of International Yoga Day, Proyog is meant for serious yoga practitioners and aims to enhance their practice. Presently, the product is selling over eCommerce platforms, both in the domestic market and internationally.

In the future there are plans to sell through premium and specialized MBOs and yoga studios worldwide; and high-end chains in the US like Neiman Marcus, Saks 5th Avenue, and Nordstrom.

Our Engagement:

Vinculum has enabled Proyog to hit the market with Vin eRetail, our retail suite that enables multi-channel order management and fulfillment. Proyog has a multi-company model to cater to its B2B and B2C orders and inventory separately.

Vin eRetail has facilitated the execution of this model, via its robust functionality and host of functionalities. The solution helped Proyog streamline its online operations and order fulfillment processes.

Vin eRetail’s in-built integrations with leading logistics companies, accounting systems, and other powerful functionalities will help Proyog setup and run cross-border operations.

Any tips or comments for us?  Let us know in the comments below.

Ralali partners with Vinculum to fuel their growth

All about Ralali:

Ralali is one of leading Indonesia’s business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce marketplaces for maintenance, repair, and operational (MRO) products. The marketplace currently has around 50,000 unique product listings, as well over 700 product categories and more than 300,000 monthly visitors.

Key Challenges:

As a growing enterprise, Ralali wanted to manage their increasing database of product data and enhance data quality. They wanted to provide convenience to customers, decrease transportation costs and deliver orders faster.

They needed to ensure a fantastic shopping experience for their customers, to enable customer delight. This could be achieved via a one-stop solution for managing and validating product information.

They required a solution to –

• Reduce their time to market.
• Improve consistency across product listings.
• Enable faster customer purchase decisions.
• Deliver a fantastic shopping experience.

The Vinculum Solution:

Vinculum implemented Vin PIM, Vinculum’s PIM solution which streamlines product information coming from multiple sources & provides consistency across all sales channels; enabling organizations to offer customers a great shopping experience.

How this helped Ralali:

• It eliminated duplicate and redundant information by 40%.
• It reduced redundancies in product listings by 20%.
• Ralali could configure and manage more than 800 product categories.
• It enabled category-wise definition of product specifications to help Ralali utilize them for filter based search.
• It allowed creation and management of multiple hierarchies required for multiple sales channels, corporates, and suppliers.
• Vin PIM’s workflow manager helped Ralali define its processes for product registration ensuring correct, validated and consistent product information across the portal.
• With organized and relevant product information, Ralali has:
  • Reduced its time to market.
  • Enabled cross-selling and upselling of products.
  • Improved the time taken by customers to make purchase decisions.

Customers were more engaged – since their shopping experience was made more enjoyable – with the addition of filter based search, consistent product information, reduced time to purchase etc.

What lies ahead?

Recently, Ralali raised a US$2.5 million series A funding round from Japan-based Beenos Plaza and CyberAgent Ventures. Ralali’s existing investors, East Ventures also participated in the round.

Going forward, the marketplace will use the fresh capital to expand the team, build out product development and marketing strategies, and bolster user acquisition.

Read the complete story of how we fueled Ralali’s growth here.

 Any tips or questions for us? Leave them in the comments below.

Fabity fuels their eCommerce journey with Vinculum

All about Fabity:

Fabity is a leading fashion-curating brand that aspires to bring together latest designs/products from handpicked designers, eCommerce marketplaces & traditional markets on a single platform in India.

Key Challenges:

Defining affordable fashion in the country, Fabity needed an eCommerce solution that would help streamline its order management and inventory management processes.

Fabity partnered with Vinculum to handle critical business functions such as Order and inventory Management.

They required a solution that –

• Provided real-time visibility of inventory
• Synchronized front end and back end operations for higher turnaround times.
• Delivered the ability to handle bulk orders
• Enabled order tracking across multiple geographies

The Vinculum Solution:

Vin eRetail , our end to end retail suite helped the online retailer attain greater productivity levels, reduce inefficiencies and scale up its operations. It delivered the following –

• Real-time end to end inventory visibility to keep a check on inventory levels.
• An efficient order management system which reduced order processing times.
• Shipment tracking which led to reduced turnaround times.
• A single interface for the all procurement related details – fast moving inventory, purchase orders etc.
• An efficient returns management system.

The implementation of our solution automated their operations.

This reduced their order fulfillment cycles, increasing efficiency for the online retailer.

Read the complete story of how we helped Fabity here.

 Any tips or questions for us? Leave them in the comments below –