Most furniture store retailers endure complex operational challenges relating to importing, logistics, fulfilment, and stock transfers – and for all staff in the company to have complete visibility across the entire supply chain. Retail Express is purpose built for bulky goods retail. We have more than 200 furniture store retailers using our software to reduce their costs, improve efficiencies, and grow their sales. Companies like Early Settler, Vast Interior, Forty Winks, and many more!
1.Cloud Technology & Purpose Built for Bulky Goods
– We are a pure Cloud platform. This means there is no polling of data between locations, no chances of data corruption, and no chances of delayed information. You have one central pool of information. All information is live and centralised, and visible in real time, 24/7.
– Easy Remote Access. You can view and manage your business from anywhere in the world
– You save a lot of Money on IT. You don’t need to invest in expensive servers or computers – we handle all IT via our $85M Data Centre. You also don’t need to spend money hiring IT staff to manage, upgrade and repair IT equipment.
2. Improved Customer Service with Better Supply Chain Visibility
– A sales person can look up the exact level of inventory for any product, across all store locations and warehouse, in real time. It is 100% accurate, all of the time.
– The system gives you accurate supply chain visibility instantly – which factors in all our outstanding customer orders plus stock in all locations, including inbound containers. This allows your sales staff to provide accurate ETA information on sales orders. Hence, customer service is improved and due to ETA accuracy, you don’t get as many order cancellations.
– With live visibility of what’s inbound on containers – your sales staff can easily ‘sell’ off the stock on these containers!
– No other retail system on the market can provide an accurate, real time ETA date for all items on the sales order.
3. Reduced Order Administration with Multiple Fulfilment Methods
When creating new sales orders, Retail Express offers the unique functionality of setting different methods of fulfilment for each individual product within the order. This includes Cash and Carry; Store Pickup; Home Delivery & Warehouse Pickup. A customer ordering a dining room suite & home wares may want home delivery for the bulky items, and Cash & Carry for the smaller items. Each item on the order can be flagged with whichever individual fulfilment method is required. The software than handles all the appropriate background inventory controls and stock movement according to the method of fulfilment for each individual product. All other retail systems treat all products on the sales order as having only one Fulfilment method and do not provide individual product level fulfilment control. The benefit of Retail Express is that only one sales order needs to be created for the customer, irrespective of how each item is fulfilled. This substantially reduces order administration.
4. Better Inventory Control with Source and Fulfilment Location Settings
When creating a sales order, sales staff has the ability to choose which stock location seach product will be Sourced from, and which location it will be fulfilled from. This is controllable by each individual product in the order. For example, a customer is ordering a lounge suite and a buffet:
– The lounge suite is only available at the warehouse and is not in stock at the local store location. Further, the customer wants this lounge home delivered. The Sales person can choose to ‘Source’ the lounge suite from the Warehouse location by simply choosing a drop down on the screen.
They can then set the Fulfilment Location to also be from the warehouse, meaning that the lounge will be delivered directly to the customer from the warehouse
– For the buffet, the customer may want to collect it from the store where the sale transaction is made. As such, the sales person can choose to ‘Source’ the buffet from the Warehouse, but make the Fulfilment location the local store. This is done by easy drop down list selections in the POS screen.
This process will result in the software automatically generating a stock transfer request for the Buffet from the warehouse, to the store location, and automatically handle the stock allocation in the system.
The ability for the sales person to have control over the Source and Fulfilment location for each individual product on the sales order provides major efficiencies to the retailer, and substantially reduces manual Administration.
5. Preventing Over-Sells and Saving Time with Automatic Stock Transfers
As and when new sales orders are created at the store locations, there are many circumstances where the inventory needs to be transferred into the local store location, either from the warehouse or from another store, in order to fulfil customer orders. Other retail systems require these stock transfers to be ‘manually’ generated by the User, and for the inventory to be manually allocated at the source location. That is, someone needs to manually identify which sales orders require inventory from another location, and then manually create the stock transfer within the system. This process takes valuable administration time, and is sometimes a forgotten process. In addition to this, if a sale is made at store level on a busy weekend, which requires stock to be allocated and transferred from the warehouse; it is common occurrence for a different sales person at a different store to allocate and commit the same product – resulting in ‘over-selling’ or over committing the same stock. This often results in customer order cancellations, and dissatisfied customers. To solve this problem, when a sales person makes a sale in a store that requires stock to be sourced from another location, Retail Express automatically allocates the inventory in real time at that other store location, and also generates the Stock Transfer request, without any manual intervention whatsoever. This results in improved customer service, reduction of over-sells, more accurate and timely management of inventory, and a massive reduction in manual administration of Stock Transfers.6. Advanced Logistics and Warehouse Features.
Retail Express provides a complete suite of logistics features. Most other retail systems do not offer the breadth and depth of these warehouse logistics features. Importing • Container tracking & Capacity Planning • Supplier Payment Tracking • Foreign Exchange Management • Stoc Receipt with scanning
Replenishment Just in time stock replenishment using smart algorithms that factor in lead times from suppliers, stock turn rates, days on hand of stock, and various other factors – to ensure you have the right stock at the right time. Picking, Dispatch & Fulfilment
• Picking reports with filters to efficiently pick and plan• Allocating pick runs to specific ‘pickers’ and exporting pick lists• Picking stock directly off inbound purchase orders (to fill customer orders)• Dispatch reports with various filters to efficiently dispatch stock• Partial dispatch of Stock Transfers and Customer Orders• Container and truck capacity (space) planning;• Receiving Stock Transfers, with ‘Goods Receipt Anomaly’ tracking• Customer Fulfilment of orders from any location:
• Home deliveries• Delivery Zones• Delivery Times• Delivery Drivers• Driver Run Sheets & Manifests, etc.• Warehouse & Store Pickups
Follow Aaron on G+ Looking to fast track your growth with a smarter point of sale system? Contact the Retail Express team today on 1300 732 618.