Are your buyers doing their job to the best of their ability? Of course they are: That’s what you hired them for. But if you haven’t invested in the right tools to help them do their jobs, you’re not maximizing their abilities.
At daVinci we believe in empowering buyers so that they can focus on their core competencies and make better, faster and more accurate buying decisions — so that you can deliver the products your customers truly crave, with profits you want. And we do that with our retail management system that is fully integrated in the retail cloud.
Do your buyers need a retail cloud management system? Here are the signs to look for.
1. Users are stuck with error-prone spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets can be risky. Whenever data entry comes down to a manual process, it means that all calculations can be susceptible to human error. Whether it’s keying in the wrong numbers, copying over the wrong amounts, overtyping incorrect numbers or formulas, spreadsheet blunders happen all the time — and can be extremely costly. Research from Market Watch suggests that 88% of spreadsheets have errors, and that spreadsheet errors cost organizations 0.8% of their total receipt dollars.
When you can’t fully trust the data at hand, you’re in constant fear of the impact working with inaccurate data can have on your business when it comes time to making a critical buy decision or worried about simply losing valuable information because the file is saved on a persons desktop.
2. Users are spending too much time doing manual and repetitive tasks.
You don’t hire and pay buyers to copy-paste data from one spreadsheet to another, or to spend entire mornings tracking down the most recent copy of a spreadsheet; you hire them for their skill and creativity in finding and selecting the styles and colors that your customers will love.
Yet most buyers will tell you they spend more than a third of their time on manual tasks that could be automated. How much better would your buys be if you could reduce, or eliminate, that wasted time?
3. Your teams aren’t collaborating.
When data is stuck on individual laptops, and not shared across the entire enterprise, it adds more digital roadblocks when you should be working to organize, simplify, and automate otherwise tedious day-to-day business operations.
When you can’t measure, manage and grow your business because of the lack of collaboration, having an end-to-end collaborative solution will empower a stronger decision-making process organization-wide. A retail management solution eliminates the need for buyers to go to four or five different tools to do their job, and the central database gives them all the information they need at their fingertips .
4. Your data isn’t up-to-date and accurate.
Without real-time updates, your teams are not all working off the same information, and inaccurate data will eventually snowball — if one buyer is working off one set of data and another buyer has a different set, you’ll have to reconcile those plans at some point, causing further headaches, costing you money and momentum that you otherwise need to compete in the retail arena.
5. You’re not adapting quickly enough.
Change is the one certainty in retail: vendor offerings change; market trends shift; sales patterns fluctuate. How fast can your organization react and adapt to these changes?
Traditional solutions offer restrictive workflows make fast reactions all but impossible; if you complete a 10-step buying process and something changes that impacts step 3, going all the way back is the last thing you want to do.
A buying solution that is built to expect change, and allows you to insert a change anywhere in your process, and shows you the impact before you implement it, will allow you to remain flexible and ensure you’re keeping pace with customer expectations — and your competition.
Learn more about daVinci’s Buy Management System
A best-in-class retail management system can help you capture and store customer information for stronger inventory management while simultaneously minimizing data collection errors and actually supporting an omnichannel experience for each of your sales channels. With a purchase order system on their side, your buyers will be able to do their jobs better than ever, and everyone in your organization will benefit.
Want to see daVinci’s Buy Management System in action? Get in touch with us to schedule a demonstration today.
