14 minute read
Feature
by OPI
Special Issue TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS Special Issue TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
The YEAR of TECHNOLOGY
Window of opportunity or missed chance? For independent dealers, COVID-19 has presented both pivots and pain points
Early last year, with little warning, our industry – the world at large, in fact – was catapulted into a global pandemic. A few months later, in our annual Technology Solutions special issue of OPI, it had become obvious that this wasn’t going to be a short-term crisis, but an industry-churning event which would require considerable resilience and stamina. And an awful lot of technology.
From the initial quick-on-your-feet thinking to longer-term adjustments to systems and processes, technology has been at the very heart of the past ‘COVID year’. OPI’s Heike Dieckmann asked a selection Special Issue of solutions providers in our space about the highs and lows and their specific efforts in helping independent dealers come out bigger and stronger on the other side. VENDOR SPECIAL
CHARLES RUSSELL, CO-OWNER, SSI
Over the past year or so, we have experienced a broad spectrum of performances, from customers with sales down 50% to some that are seeing their best year ever. Those that have thrived have done so because of their ability to procure and sell COVID-related products while dealers which didn’t manage to do that lost out massively.
Customer mix was also a factor. Businesses with a heavy school volume, for example, have not fared well. Overall, about 3% of our OP dealers have either gone out of business or sold it.
In terms of technology capabilities, mobile access has become paramount due to the work-from-home (WFH) situation. The challenge for technology companies has been to ensure the availability of mobile access by a dealer’s workforce, delivery people and customers while still protecting the security of the dealer’s system.
From digitally creating, transmitting and receiving purchasing orders to routing and completing deliveries, automation and efficiency have been the chief goals in order to manage the WFH situation but also to cut costs, especially the considerably higher home delivery expenses.
Dealers have been agile and found new sources for products that were in short supply and high demand by adapting to a disbursed worker environment – among their own as well as their customers’ staff. As companies call back employees and schools bring back students, these challenges continue, with dealers adapting to new furniture and office layout demands.
SSI PRIORITIES
As for SSI specifically, we cut our own cost structure too; we let go of employees to make sure we could absorb our cost increases and not raise maintenance for our customers. In terms of software development, we pushed even harder on automating certain functions to help dealers lower expenses in those areas.
We added additional merchandising controls to SSIweb so dealers’ customers can purchase the item that is the best value for them and which gives the dealer the highest margin. We also improved the system to make it friendlier and more efficient for employees working from home. All our new dealer sites incorporate responsive technology, for example, and provide a good mobile ordering experience without the need for a mobile app.
In addition, we partnered with other companies to provide dealers with more options. We helped develop and perfect an excellent mobile proof-of-delivery system, for instance, and integrated ITEM411 with our software to assist dealers with managing pricing and protecting their margins.
In terms of our own key (product) development, we’re focused on the web and dealer management tools. Our web storefront is already extremely
Special Issue VENDOR SPECIA
Special Issue VENDOR SPECIA
user-friendly, but we aim to make it even better by adding more solutions to aid with merchandising and SEO. Even with pandemic restrictions lifting, dealers are still facing a lot of challenges and being able to evaluate costs and profitability is essential. We want to give them new ways to analyse and manage things like pricing, product and delivery costs, and customer profitability.
The biggest challenge for dealers is margin management, which is why it is one of our development priorities. Even if sales come back as people return to work and school, dealers are going to be faced with fast-rising product costs and related consumer pricing.
Their biggest opportunities are the furniture, office supplies and jan/san segments which businesses, schools and government agencies will tap into as they prepare for the return of employees and students.
Workers who don’t go back to the office present another target audience. Dealers should be attacking the businesses that were served by Staples or Office Depot and which have not seen a sales person in months. As always, they need to sell their value versus a player such as Amazon. They can also help those companies manage their home workers, providing cost containment for remote employees through purchasing rules enforcement.
Find out more: www.ssiop.com
Most of our dealers have fared very well during the pandemic, with some even up in the double digits year on year due to selling PPE. That’s not to say it was easy – they had to source the product and also find the customers – but when push came to shove they evolved and adapted to a completely unprecedented environment. Well-oiled tech support has been crucial, be that related to handling special requests for changes, dealing with out-of-stock items or delivering specific COVID messages to customers.
With new technology innovations also come the bad actors. At Dealer Commander, much of our focus has been on DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks and hackers; we have spent a lot of time and resources on the best cybersecurity providers to protect ourselves as well as our dealers.
Apart from this, we’ve been concentrating on a number of areas, including digital paperless delivery. We’ve also enhanced our online offering to make sure dealers have plenty of upsell opportunities.
Dealers’ end users need to have a quick and seamless click-buy experience when purchasing online. To make shopping even better, by the end of Q3, we’re planning to introduce Plan-N-Save orders whereby end users can preschedule their deliveries. Overall, we are allocating considerable resources so that dealers can compete with online giants like Amazon.
Find out more: www.dealercommander.com
Looking back over the years, independents have always figured out a way to move their businesses forward, even during periods when there have been headwinds in our industry.
The key word that consistently comes to mind when I talk to our dealers is entrepreneurship. They never fail to impress me, particularly the way they have been able to find new areas where they can do business.
During the pandemic, the majority of our dealers quickly focused on PPE and jan/san as well as other lines that were in demand. The challenge then became supply, with manufacturers unable to produce quickly enough – another headwind for dealers.
Our solutions have helped them analyse where their business was strong by giving them timely access to data so they could make informed decisions. E-commerce was, and continues to be, a really important area for our independent dealers, so we’ve focused a lot of energy and investment on helping them with better website design and e-commerce content. It’s more crucial now than ever for business solutions operators to maintain a strong web presence and provide an excellent customer experience. The ability to compete with the larger retailers is a focal point in our industry. As more and more consumer behaviour moves online it’s vital that the experience is feature-rich with excellent content. It’s even more important that the transaction is secure.
A big challenge for technology providers like ECI is working within the context of our customers’ businesses to deliver a result that meets exceptionally high expectations. We have certainly seen our dealers’ ability to move towards what’s working and away from what’s not. Our technology allows them to be much more efficient when making decisions.
It’s our job to give dealers timely access to information so that these decisions can be made. Enabling them to analyse gross profit margins on thousands of SKUs immediately; making the required price changes without human intervention; and guaranteeing we’re integrated with the wholesalers in the most efficient way possible – these are all examples of how we can help.
There has been a lot of price volatility in the market, with rapidly changing costs from manufacturers and wholesalers. Dealers had to implement better technology to face these challenges head on.
In this context, one of the single biggest things we’ve done to assist is launch Margin Accelerator at the beginning of 2020, a solution designed to automate and manage end-user product pricing.
With inflation starting to pick up now and the cost of goods rising, it’s vital that dealers use technology to help manage their margins. Without it, it’s incredibly hard to keep up with the thousands of cost adjustments they receive on a regular basis.
ADDRESSING THE CHANGED WORKPLACE
Our business in Europe has been focusing on helping dealers better deal with day-to-day problems presented by a decentralised workplace. Deliveries to people’s homes have become much more common and there’ve been industry-specific needs such as improvements to workwear.
On a related note, we will be releasing software that allows flexibility when products are made in-house. This presents opportunities to our dealers to further specialise their business in workwear, custom furniture and promotional items.
Find out more: www.ecisolutions.com
LAUREL LOEHLIN, PRESIDENT, BMI
No doubt, everyone had some moments of panic and despair during the initial COVID-induced shutdown. But a lot of our dealers were able to rapidly adapt to the new paradigm by doing three things to assist and protect their key constituencies: • Adopt the standards laid out by the US government’s health agency, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, to protect their on-site workers, so they could get back into their warehouses. • Pursue new product lines that were suddenly and steadily in high demand, as well as new sources for existing lines. • Help their customers to comply with work-from-home requirements by providing greater flexibility in their fulfilment and delivery offerings.
BMI played an important role by supplying the technology and plenty of options that allowed them to embrace a new business model quickly and successfully. What we are doing right now is upgrading our system to a pure SaaS-based cloud environment, which will greatly reduce IT infrastructure costs and the risks associated with on-premise solutions.
As part of this system upgrade, we are providing extensive B2C functionality, which will allow dealers to compete much more effectively with the big boxes. We are incorporating sophisticated SEO functionality, for instance, so they can attract the customers they want. The biggest challenge for us at the moment is related to refining the various features while the business models of our dealers are still constantly evolving.
Find out more: www.bmiusa.com
2020 was an interesting year, especially for office products dealers with businesses that are largely designed around meeting face to face with customers.
Flexibility was key and GOPD understood that very well as we are a virtual company ourselves – our employees are scattered across the US and work from home while tied into our virtual network using online work surfaces. We’ve learnt how to work closely together, even if we’re physically far away from our colleagues.
This understanding and the need for technology flexibility is also built into our software. It’s all cloud-based, so GOPD dealers and their staff can access the software simply via an internet browser
and work from anywhere. It meant, during COVID, that they could start working remotely immediately, with no impact on order flow.
Many of our dealers did well over the past 15 months. By focusing on specific client needs – our system lets them change the pricing, product selection and order flow down to the individual buyer’s level – they were able to adjust their offering to present new options as those customers changed.
Product changes were two-pronged. There were COVID-type items that were suddenly in high demand, of course. But buyers also wanted different things in their home working environment compared to the office – our dealers, through our OP-24/7 Shopping Cart system, were able to focus their marketing on these specific home items.
Some dealers also had a bad year, there’s no doubt. Cost was a big challenge. We offer our services in modules and we advised independents which were struggling on how they could temporarily turn off modules they might not need and thereby save on their monthly expenses. So rather than quitting, they just reduced, and as their business picks up again, they have the option to turn modules back on.
Our advice to dealers was to follow a ‘crawl, walk, run and fly’ strategy. And several moved from crawl to fly very quickly. Since they were more or less home-bound, they spent a lot of time custom-designing their shopping cart, updating SEO, adding in marketing tools like reward programmes, becoming mobile-enabled, and so on.
We saw our progressive dealers turn on their creativity and begin selling and operating in a smooth, virtual way. Some did so with fewer people, less inventory and reduced overheads while others filled in what they lost with more profitable and attractive new offerings.
GOPD is proud of its dealers and how they handled a very difficult period. As 2021 moves along, we are seeing many continue to look at ways in which they can use what they learnt in 2020 and grow from it.
Find out more: www.gopd.com
ALEX NICOLAIDES, PRESIDENT, LOGICBLOCK
Many dealers have been using the same technology for years, decades in some cases. People get used to doing things the same way without questioning why; sometimes they are also done in a certain way because the solution that’s being used has limitations.
At Logicblock, we dedicate a large portion of our onboarding process to training. Our solution is flexible by design and we work closely with our customers to ensure they are making the best and maximum use of the tools we provide. During COVID – and leveraging the flexibility and capabilities of our 7cart e-commerce platform – dealers have been adding new products and suppliers at a pace we have never seen before.
BEING IN CONTROL
We provide the service of maintaining catalogues of the vendors they wish to work with, but they can also add new products and categories manually and through imports via Excel spreadsheets; they can further override managed catalogue content and have full control over it. All this has been vital. And we are in lockstep with these relationships, working towards integrating dozens of new, managed catalogue partners and enhancing the ones we already have in place, saving customers time and reducing errors.
Dealers have also been implementing new ‘trading partners’ through our platform, again at record pace, to be able to digitise and further automate their backend processes. This has not been limited to suppliers/vendors, but includes external ordering systems, marketplaces, ERPs, CRMs, etc.
Over the course of the last year, our dealer partners have been leveraging more of our built-in integrations with best of breed third party solutions. They include competition market pricing, digital proof of delivery, GPS tracking and route optimisation, tax calculation and preparation, analytics, remarketing and much more. These integrations lead to automation, saving an infinite amount of time.
Since Logicblock’s inception in 2005, we have been onboarding new customers steadily and with growing efficiency (see also Case Study, page 30). During that time, 7cart has become a flexible and powerful e-commerce solution. And, as most of our new functionalities and features are included in the core solution, everyone benefits without having to pay more.
Find out more: www.logicblock.com
I’ve seen some truly Herculean accomplishments by tech-savvy dealers, mainly those that pre-pandemic understood the importance of a fluid customer web experience.
Visibility is the core challenge for way too many. Often, when I tell people what I do, they say: “I didn’t know there were any independent dealers.” This is a direct result of ‘shopping sites’ that are not fully searchable via the popular search engines. I’m convinced this will continue to be the black hole consuming independent growth until these old systems are gone forever.
All that said, many dealers have thrived and been agile. A competitively priced website is vital in order to obtain new business and independents have really stepped up here and addressed this tough issue. Also, none of the national players require a login to see price – it’s almost a hard stop for anyone under the age of 100 when looking for a new supplier, especially the home worker.
PRICING CHALLENGES
At OPSoftware, we’ve streamlined our processes to push competitive pricing out faster to our partners. As inflation continues to soar, price timing is becoming crucial.
Our job is to make sure that customers have the freshest market-based pricing available to maintain their margins in the post-pandemic, inflation-raging markets. Daily updates are being pushed out to those system providers capable of processing them – it’s quite simply the new reality. Ancient fixed-pricing contracts will do nothing for dealers’ bottom line and are a thing of the past. Get rid of them.
Find out more: www.opsoftware.com
