120 stores must place its order for the next season: efficient solution was needed
Wolvenberg has been active in the bicycle industry since 1978 and supplies cycling clothing and accessories to the 120 most beautiful bicycle shops in the Benelux.
Each store must place its order for the next season.
There is a manually created Excel file for this that is used as an order form.
However, this process requires a lot of manual work and the risk of errors, so a better and more efficient solution was needed!
The first step in the process is to try to eliminate duplication of work and increase data quality.
Fortunately, there is already an ERP system in place (SAP) in which all products and prices are up to date.
It is a shame to manually enter product information in an Excel file with their item number, name, price (purchase price and retail price) and in which variations they are available.
In addition, the product range changes seasonally (summer/winter), meaning you always have to do manual preparation work at the start of the new season to create the order form.
For this purpose, we have built a link with the ERP system (SAP), which reads all products and their properties, in order to create an automatic, up-to-date order form.
In addition to the efficiency gain of automatically building the order form based on the ERP data, with an "online" order form you can offer much more interactivity to your user than with a static (Excel) form.
Advantages:
you always have the most current data without any effort: up-to-date product information, stock, your specific price
you can show much more information about products than just the name and price: long description, photos, videos, related products, ...
the form can contain live validations and conditional logic, for example: you cannot order more than the available stock, you can only order a specific product if you have also ordered another product, you get a discount if your order meets certain conditions, ...
as a customer, you can easily consult your previous orders, make a complete reorder, highlight your favorite products or create standard order lists to quickly place new orders
you provide a protected, safe, always up-to-date environment for your customers, over which you retain full control and ownership, for example: you can adjust the order form at any time, show a temporary message to your customer or temporarily disable the order form
With every action or manipulation within a web application, automatic actions can be started.
For example, we initiate the following actions after a customer has entered an order:
the order is immediately passed on to the underlying ERP system SAP via API without anyone from Wolvenberg having to process or retype it manually
we send an email as order confirmation to the customer
… we can initiate other actions, such as request an online payment
Many companies still process a B2B order in a semi-manual manner, which is not the best choice in a competitive market with high labor costs.
Manual processes are very error-prone, expensive to scale up and don't show much professionalism.
