Business is not a solo sport - fates of businesses are increasingly interlinked
Rapid response, seamless efficiency, end-to-end visibility and on-the-go adaptability are the new competitive advantage
It simplifies experiences, boosts agility, combines clean-data and sparks opportunities to accelerate growth
Traditional trade formats are outdated - slow, unresponsive, uncoordinated and opaque. Almost all B2B trade partners recognize the need to change, but are struggling to shift to more modern online methods of trade. Manual interfaces of order processing via phone calls, emails, fax, courier, spreadsheets etc. are clearly inefficient, cumbersome, error-prone and expensive. The process compounds rising complexities in the buy-sell processes. Employees on either side of the trade waste time chasing, matching and reconciling data instead of investing time to more strategic and value-add tasks.
They are slow, unresponsive, uncoordinated and opaque. Inherently inefficient manual processes with duplicative back-n-forth in inter-party interfaces. Opaque and expensive silos slowdown business and breakdown scale. Poor customer responsiveness - lacks coordination and convenience. Unavoidable rework, duplication and non-value-add tasks.
Experience is the new age mandate and also the competitive differentiator (with already diluted product and price differentiation). The Amazon Effect has rubbed-off from B2C to B2B. Ease and convenience with on-demand content, live status and the works.
Spoilt by options, customers want more and now. With rising customer intolerance and impatience, alongside diluted product and price differentiation, competition is now about speed and responsiveness.
Too much administration and non-value-added work done by the salesforce. Opportunity to gain sales productivity - double or even triple. Critical to fix the attention deficit in sales as they struggle to chase status updates and to arrange for timely order processing.
Both on the sell-side and buy-side - i.e. distributors and vendors. Diversity and decentralization is integral to market reach - and to deliver upon the evolving customer expectations. Deeper alignment also needed for increasing regulatory/ compliance requirements, market threats, product safety considerations, channel data and market intelligence.
More to manage from manpower inflation to regulatory requirements. Talent is becoming scarce and expensive. Increasing need for reporting, visibility and traceability. Manual work is increasingly expensive and error-rpone. Back and forth of manual interfaces across standalong ERP/IT systems with high duplication and inefficient handoffs are a cause for adverse event.
Brand has to own-up for the entire chain - across the channel. Customers expect directly from the brand - irrespective of who they deal with in the chain. With rising customer intolerance and impatience, brands are consciously shaping and monitoring performance across the end-to-end chain.
Need clean channel data real-time. Real-time fresh data instead of stale reported data.
