Greetings from Vinculum – Happy Diwali!

Industrybuying collaborates with Vinculum to accelerate its growth

All about Industrybuying:

Industrybuying is a one-of-its-kind online platform, featuring an exclusive range of utility products for all industrial purposes. The online marketplace began its operations during 2013, with an objective to inculcate and introduce the concept of industrial supply chains in India. They currently have a cataloged collection of over 1.5 Lac SKUs, from brands across global geographies.

Since their advent in 2013, they rapidly increased their business and market value by offering optimum solutions to the nation’s industrial community.

Key Challenges:

Industrybuying switched to the hybrid online marketplace, which hindered their productivity. The challenges they faced were the management of 4000 plus sellers on their platform, integration of inventory across multiple warehouses, and the streamlining of orders and returns.

They required a solution that could –

• Manage more than 4000 sellers
• Reduce turnaround time
• Process more than 25k orders on a monthly basis
• Reduce the number of returns for them

The Vinculum Solution:

We worked with Industrybuying to on-board and manage their sellers quickly. Our solutions also helped them set up their online Marketplace and manage their eCommerce back-end. We delivered the following –

• Vin Seller Panel helped Industrybuying manage 4000 plus sellers selling on its platform.
• Robust functionalities to manage their orders and inventory effectively and efficiently.
• Inbuilt ticketing module in Vin eRetail for the management of customer complaints on time.
• Extensive reports to help Industrybuying to keep track of key KPIs of business operations.
• Forward and reverse tracking of shipment through inbuilt transporter integration

The implementation of our solution meant that they could save on costs and resources reduce manual processes – and improve their order and inventory management.

Read the complete story of how we helped Industrybuying here.

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

LBC partners with Vinculum to grow business, fulfill orders cross border

LBC is Philippines’ market leader in cross border fulfillment, payments, remittances, cargo and logistics.

Founded in 1945 as a brokerage and air cargo agent, LBC pioneered time-sensitive cargo delivery and 24-hour door-to-door delivery in the Philippines.

Today, it is the most trusted global logistics and remittance provider with a growing network of over 6,400 location and a partner/agent network over 30 countries.

Our Engagement:

Shipping Cart by LBCX is a fulfillment solution designed to serve customers who want to shop from US online stores and have the items shipped to the Philippines. With the steady growth in volume since its launch a couple of years back, Shipping Cart soon found the need for a robust platform to manage items received in behalf of its customers, holding these items as inventory until they are processed for shipping.

The logistics provider required a platform that would:

– Provide end-to-end visibility on the status of items from receipt to shipment.
– Ensure compliance with the warehouse processes via workflow controls .
– Provide easy integration with the Shipping Cart front-end and LBC USA’s Vistra system
– Deliver flexibility to handle the unique challenge of handling Shipping Cart inventory.

These requirements were unique, and were not supported by most warehouse management systems.

Thus, LBC looked to Vinculum‘s Vin eRetail WMS as its solution of choice, due to its capabilities specifically designed to enable cross border fulfillment. Vin eRetail WMS will help them manage their warehouse operations and fulfill orders of Filipino customers for their online shopping in the United States of America.

Read the complete story here.

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

Replay: How to Take On the New Frontiers of Retailing

The shoppers of today want it all. They want to browse online, research offline, touch and feel the merchandise in the store, get the purchase delivered home, picked up from a store/nearby location, or reserved at a location of their choice.

The challenge for Online and Offline retailers today is to create a compelling shopper experience across channels.

We partnered with ETRetail to delve deeper, answer these questions and talk opportunities for Online and Offline retailers in a webinar. Our webinar, scheduled on Thursday, September 8 featured Mr. Raviraj Rodrigues, Supply Chain Head, Wildcraft, Mr. Niket Anand, Associate Director, Tolexo and was moderated by Mr. Venkat Nott, CEO, Vinculum.

Mr. Nott in his opening remarks observed, “The changing expectations of shoppers have changed how the retail industry is approaching customer experience. Brick and mortar retailers are going online, online retailers are collaborating with offline retail outlets to allow customers to touch and feel their products, marketplaces are collaborating with retailers, CPGs and Manufacturers are selling through multiple sales channels.”

He added, “These are multiple collaboration opportunities & new avenues for revenues for the entire ecosystem.”

Taking forward the discussion, Mr. Raviraj Rodrigues spoke of the opportunities that lie in partnerships between members of the eCommerce ecosystem. Using his organization, Wildcraft as an example, he commented, “Wildcraft collaborates with leading marketplaces to sell its merchandise. It leverages multiple sales channels – such as its offline stores, online store as well online marketplaces to sell to customers.”

Mr. Niket Anand spoke of how Tolexo has entered the B2B space by on-boarding 7000+ sellers, allowing them to increase their sales, get greater returns and improve customer experience.

He said, “For the customer, 4 things are very important for a great customer experience. First, price – the marketplace should price their products competitively. Second, the service provided to customers should be superior- both pre and post-delivery. Third, customers should be provided convenience – how easily they can find your products matters. Lastly, availability – the products that customers want should be available.”

Adding to this, he detailed what strategies Tolexo has undertaken to deliver customer experience, “To achieve this, Tolexo has undertaken a host of strategic initiatives – developed regional fulfillment hubs to ensure greater inventory holding capacity and better localized fulfillment, launched Tolexo speedy – to ensure superior quality and 24 hour dispatch to ensure faster, timely delivery, trained sellers via B2B seller panel, seller onboarding programs, seller training videos to enable sellers to fulfill orders from online and offline channels. We are trying to build experience stores to allow customers to experience products and their quality and then place orders.”

The panelists wrapped up the discussion by answering questions about how offline and online retailers can create new revenue streams.

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE:

How can a customer ensure that he does not receive a counterfeit good from a marketplace?

RAVI – Customer awareness. Whether you are making a purchase online or offline, you need to look at buying products from authorized sellers. There are some authorized sellers for the products, also FBA, Flipkart Advantage are options that you should look at, for quality assurance. Just as in brick and mortar stores you would buy from an authorized seller, similarly in online purchases also you should check the seller before purchase.

How can sellers plan their purchase and put a proper price for their products?

NIKET – There are various tools that are available to do that. One of the things that marketplaces that try to do is help you be competitive on prices.

The marketplace will assist you to understand how much inventory you should stock, the sales you can expect, and a competitive price point/range you can target.

For a medium sized retailer, wishing to capture new avenues of revenue, do you think they should go on their own? Or they should tie up with an established marketplace?

VENKAT – Identify the correct marketplace to collaborate with, and then go for a partnership. I would say that partnering with marketplaces is a very effective option for a retailer.

RAVI – Collaboration is key. A medium sized retailer should look at collaboration rather than setting up one’s own stores. Wildcraft, for example, sells via a plethora of channels. There is no competition between the two channels, and retailers should not see this as a concern.

Missed our webinar? Watch the webinar replay here:

Key Takeaways of the Webinar:

• O2O transformation: How to get the best of both Online & Offline worlds
• State of the Industry & Key Trends
• Case studies: Strategic Online-Offline & Omnichannel initiatives
• Challenges in the existing IT landscape & ideas to overcome them
• Offline-Online-Offline Continuum: Is it a strategic fit for your business?

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

SafetyKart Turbocharges its business with Vinculum

All about SafetyKart:

SafetyKart is an online destination that brings all the safety needs to one single place. SafetyKart partnered with Vinculum to streamline and manage critical business functions such as Returns Management, SKU Management, Inventory Management and Shipments which was causing the productivity levels to fall sharply.

Key Challenges:

SafetyKart required an eCommerce solution that would allow it to overcome challenges it faced in order fulfillment and increase its operational efficiency.

They required a solution that –

• Integrated their Prestashop front end with back end operations.
• Handled bulk orders timely and efficiently.
• Enabled tracking of all orders.

The Vinculum Solution:

We implemented Vin eRetail, an end-to-end retail suite, to help SafetyKart transform its business operations, manage business functions better and improve productivity. Our one-stop solution automated the online retailer’s operations. It delivered the following –

• Real-time tracking of Inventory
• Efficient tracking of shipments to reduce turnaround time.
• Efficient SKU management, enabling product listing on a single platform.
• Single interface for all procurement related details such as – fast moving inventory, purchase orders etc.
• Efficient Returns Management System to manage different return scenarios.
• Reduced turnaround time with automated processes

The implementation of our solution meant that they could save on costs and resources due to automation of processes. They could streamline their operations, improve order fulfillment and inventory management.

Read the complete story of how we helped SafetyKart here.

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

Vinculum and The MDM Institute Webinar: J&J’s Success with Business-Critical Master Data Governance

                              “MDM Without governance…is just data integration!” – Aaron Zornes

Large organizations today have hundreds or thousands of databases and applications. Creating business value from this large amount of data is no longer an easy task.

Master Data describes the core data assets on which a business runs. The goal of Master Data Management (MDM) is to identify, validate and resolve all data issues, and at the same time, create a ‘Golden Copy’ or master data set for all the enterprise’s systems and services.

Data governance ensures that the data is understood by the business from a definition, sourcing, quality and accountability perspective.

Research from The MDM Institute confirms that Master Data Governance (MDG) empowers enterprises to enhance business performance, and integrate business policies with operational processes.

Vinculum is partnering with The MDM Institute in a webinar to discuss Master Data Governance and how enterprises can leverage it to improve data quality and streamline operations in an efficient way.

The webinar will offer expert advice from Aaron Zornes, Chief Research Officer, The MDM Institute, Gil Gamez, Master Data & Supply Chain Systems, Johnson & Johnson, Annajee Nott, Co-founder, Vinculum Group, Deepak Singla, Co-founder, Vinculum Group, Paul Moodey, Global Supply Chain, Johnson & Johnson, and Gregory Emmert, VP Operations – USA, Vinculum Group.

This one-hour webinar will provide an overview of key MDG trends along with an in-depth case study by Fortune 50 pharmaceutical Johnson & Johnson. Register here.

13th October 2016
11:30 am – 12:30 am EST

Key Takeaways of the webinar:

• Delivering fast Time-to-Value via pre-built industry specific business rules.
• Applying MDG to establish Data Model & Business Rules.
• Maintaining enterprise data quality via MDG-managed Business Process Orchestration.
• Synchronizing Data Elements, Reference Data, Business Rules & Business Glossaries.

Rand Internet Marketing Announces Partnership With Vinculum

Fort Lauderdale-Based Internet Marketing Company Partners with Global Software Company for Multi-Channel Order Management and Fulfillment.