As E-Commerce B2B is not about competing with Magento and the likes, we approach the e-commerce field from practical angle, and mainly focus on process efficiency benefits your e-commerce channel can provide. Select Solutions E-Commerce is primarily about less clicks, instant order entry and processing, handling volume, and end-to-end e-commerce integration to other business processes you run to support the supply chain, like warehouse, purchasing and financial accounting.
E-Commerce Orders Are No Different
When running Dynamics NAV with E-Commerce B2B included, it does not matter for the order processor or warehouse, how did the order arrive. Regardless of the sales channel, all orders in your Dynamics NAV are processed from a single list of sales orders. The warehouse and dispatching should not really care of creating customer cards etc., and that is automatically done by E-Commerce. While rarely required for B2B model, B2C scenario typically expects each order to be pre-validated before having it accepted as legitimate demand affecting your global item availability. This being the case, there is a one-click function in E-Commerce for pre-validating E-Commerce orders.
Automation
Good ERP systems like Dynamics NAV are by design flexible enough to be fully tailored for your unique process and workflow. Whenever you notice repetitive mechanical human actions with the system, they are easy to automate. With E-Commerce B2B being an open-source Dynamics NAV add-on, the e-commerce part of your process is no exception. Some easy examples include an automated emailing of order confirmation upon new orders if everything is in stock, or text/SMS notifications of prepayments arriving in your bank account. This kind of automation can be done by any Dynamics NAV partner you are working with.
End-to-end Traceability
There are numerous tasks performed on the orders from customer placing the order to customer receiving the goods. Validation, approval, warehouse picking or linked purchase order tracking, payment transaction and application, packaging and shipping being some of the generic examples. Having E-Commerce orders managed within Dynamics NAV ensures the full action log for each e-commerce order is generated and stored in NAV exclusively, which in turn enables you to easily overview what has happened, who was involved, what is the current status and what the linked documents are. The ability to do this as a matter of single click provides great value to customer service and line management. In addition, you can expose any of this information to your E-Commerce web application for even better customer experience.
More Self-service, Less Consulting
The modern buying paradigms ask for self-service capability. Now more than ever, customers are willing
to do it agile - arrive at buying decisions at their pace, and at the time of their convenience. E-Commerce is
here to provide that opportunity. Your business, on the other hand, will save on the effort of pre-sales
consulting. Upon engaging with you, the customer will already know the deal they are after.
Order Entry Done by Customers
Shifting the routine work of keying in the order lines to customer side can be a significant time and cost
saver, especially in wholesales. Thinking of e-commerce ROI, it is probably the easiest excercise to add up
the time spent on order entry over a year or two, and imagine you would not have that cost on your behalf.
We cannot promise every single of your customers will buy online, yet the goal is clear and the results
directly affect the bottom line.
One-Click Processing
Since your e-commerce orders arrive in ERP system directly, there is every single reason to aim for sending
it to warehouse with one click. Depending on your business, you might not even need that “quick human validation”
stage, and the power of thorough ERP intgration makes this a reality.
In trade business, it is errors that happen to break the day. Each error impacts your schedule, requires custom actions to be taken, hits customer loyalty, and may increase unwanted stock, all of which is the cost and effort to avoid. Some companies are even financially charged for wrong or late deliveries, or even errors in the shipping documentation.
The ERP-integrated e-commerce is a great way to eliminate different classes of errors by eliminating human action in various stages.
Wrong Items Purchased/Sold
This is probably the trickiest one, as sometimes it is true that you know the right product better than your customer indeed, and letting the customer choose without consulting may lead to returns. While this is somewhat out of scope of what software can assist you with, you get the features like pre-validating the orders, cross-selling/reccomending the popular products by category or the ones you have in stock. Other than that, you eliminate the risk of order entry errors - typos, misreads, misheards and similar, and if nothing else, speaking of accountability - the wrong item was purchased, not sold.
Wrong Pricing
Pricing errors are truly the technical ones. With E-Commerce B2B, all the pricing logic from Dynamics NAV is re-used, essentially guaranteeing that the e-commerce customer will get the same price as if you would manually enter the same order in Dynamics NAV.
Understock Situations
Handling understock varies from business to business. Some would take preorders/backorders, some will not accept orders for items not in stock, some would just warn you, and for some it will be the norm to not keep stock at all, and start purchasing/manufacturing right after the demand has arrived. In either case, your e-commerce must know the current stock to “promise” the delivery date, which directly affects the customer's buying decision, and having shown it wrong is a serious setback. With E-Commerce B2B being driven by Dynamics NAV data, you can rest assured there is a single source of stock availability across all sales channels. Having it all ERP-integrated essentially means that e.g. at the moment an item is sold at POS desk or an order is created manually by your manager, the updated inventory is automatically reflected to everyone browsing your e-commerce.