«If you’re not online, you don’t exist!» This sentence is not from a smartphone-dependent teenager, but from a professional sales consultant. Global eCommerce sales to consumers are still comparatively low at just under two trillion euros – measured in terms of total sales in the B2C sector, however, without the internet almost nothing works anymore. What has long been valid in the non-food sector is now also valid for perishable goods such as food. One in five Internet shoppers in the German-speaking DACH region now also buys food via the online shop. Delivery services, which are also able to master the last mile with their own supply fleet, are among the most successful start-ups.
However, e-shops are only as good as the back office through which the business processes are handled. It is simply no longer enough to put a few pictures on the web and provide them with an order option. The electronic shop has long been an integrated shop that requires direct access to the «single point of truth», the merchandise management system in the back office to check availability, initiate ordering and delivery processes or even production orders, make bookings in the financial applications and not least to automate complete customer communication.
«If you’re not integrated, you don’t work», the sales consultant’s sentence would have to be expanded, but it is anything but trivial to link a modern eShop with the good old ERP software. It is not only about tickle the master and article data out of the company software; it must also be possible to initiate workflows from the eShop. For the ERP system, it must not make any difference whether the production order is started from production planning or by a purchase order in the Internet. In practice, however, this is unfortunately often a very big difference.
In several projects we have achieved the connection of an eShop to an existing ERP solution with the help of our actesy framework. With our support at the coffee specialist Blaser Café and the cosmetics company Mila d´Opitz, GUS Schweiz AG has completely integrated the eShop with the GUS-OS Suite used there. For this purpose, we have created a common database for both the eShop and the ERP system and integrated the application-integrated workflow management system. This means that ordering processes in the shop immediately leads to actions in the ERP system as if they had been entered in-house via the keyboard.
The highlight: To avoid unnecessary duplicate entries, the eShop draws all article information directly from the database of the ERP system. If an item is no longer available, it can be automatically removed from the shop. If it is available, it is signaled to the shop. The price information for the articles and the invoice amounts from the shopping baskets are also compared directly with the financial software. This provides an up-to-date overview of sales at all times, depending on the sales channel. Even unpopular logistics processes and returns management can be fully integrated and thus handled flexibly.
The actesy framework is completely open – that means: No matter which ERP system operates in the background, no matter which online shop is used, we connect the online world with the offline world on a common, individually designed database. This turns an eShop into an iShop.
Our promise is: We secure your investments because we are fast, flexible and innovative. Skeptical? Then test us. We look forward to hearing from you at info@actesy.com
See you on your next digital project.
