Guest Post: Riley Kesner
In the current world of eCommerce; easy purchasing, fast shipping, and delivery are a must in order to remain competitive. Corporate giants such as Amazon have conditioned consumers to expect the utmost out of an eCommerce transaction. In 2022 it is recorded that the number of Amazon Prime users in the US has increased by 49% since 2017. As the expectation of consumers increases, so does the workload for employees within the eCommerce space. Because of this, many employees walk a fine line between peak productivity and burnout. A study from Stanford outlines the importance of a work-life balance among employees and identifies a large drop in productivity of employees who are overworked. This begs the question: How do employers meet the escalating consumer demands in an ever-growing eCommerce space without crushing employee work-life balance with mountains of work? ERP eCommerce integration may be the best solution. ERP integration provides your employees with the tools necessary to complete tasks faster, and with more accuracy minimizing stress and allowing employees to spend their time on more important tasks. Here are 3 examples of how ERP eCommerce integration can drastically improve your employee's work-life balance.
Shipping
When a customer places an online order they expect a shipping time estimation along with a tracking number. Unfortunately, obtaining the tracking and shipping information tends to be a common issue. In order to resolve this issue, Blue Link integrates with common shipping couriers such as Fed-Ex to minimize the employee process of double entry. When you integrate your eCommerce site with Blue Link, it enables customers to receive tracking information automatically allowing them to track their order themselves and reducing status update inquiries. Eliminating a small aspect of their processes such as sending tracking information and shipping estimations can save employees valuable time to accomplish more important tasks.
Generating Sales Orders
As eCommerce continues to dominate the modern shopping space, employees are spending immense amounts of time performing basic business practices. Practices such as creating sales orders, consume precious employee time that could be spent towards a healthier work-life balance. For example, when a customer places an order online, Blue Link ERP automatically creates a sales order along with updating inventory related to the order. Blue Link also allows recurring sales orders to be saved and added to a schedule. This functionality eliminates the need for an employee to complete a monthly sales order and simply create a schedule for the recurring order.
Automated Data Entry
ERP eCommerce integration not only speeds up business processes, but it completes those processes with far less error than manual completion. Bad data can cause many unforeseen issues within a business and requires employees to meticulously fix the issue. Employees waste up to 50% of their time dealing with mundane data quality tasks. Automating elements of a business that are easily affected by employee error such as accounting practices, report completion, and inventory management will ensure far fewer data errors are made and in turn will save massive amounts of time that would otherwise be used cleaning bad data. For example, BI automation will not allow accounting entries to be entered unless the transaction and entries are accurate, eliminating the need for an employee to clean or verify the data. Automated reports and sales orders also eliminate the possibility of spelling mistakes, one of the most common data entry mistakes.
Extra tip: B2BOP
Many wholesale distributors will have their own eCommerce for B2C selling but when it comes to B2B, an online order portal is different than a regular eCommerce site. Blue Link’s business-to-business order portal allows customers to filter through inventory and place their own orders at any time. Since the online order portal is directly integrated with Blue Link, inventory information and photos are pulled directly from the backend and populated on the order portal, meaning your data is always up to date in real-time and the need to upload photos and descriptions on both ends is eliminated freeing up time for your sales reps to utilize the customer management functionality and focus their time on maintaining and creating customer relationships.
In the ever-growing business world of eCommerce, speed, efficiency, and accuracy is key to keeping customers happy. Unfortunately, the demands of the growing eCommerce customer base often come at the expense of employee work-life balance. Employees are required to work harder for longer to accomplish the tasks necessary to fulfill customer expectations. ERP eCommerce integration allows your employees to improve the speed at which tasks are completed, improves efficiency through ERP automation, and decreases the chances bad data will affect the business and require an employee’s attention. Providing your employees with the right tools to do their job at the highest efficiency such as implanting an ERP drastically improves employee workload.
