Continue reading »]]> Many of us are just old enough to remember the UPS commercial about the company that launched their new online store.  The handful of entrepreneurs cheered as they saw the first orders come in.  When the orders picked up and number more than 100, they screamed. Then 1000 orders…unbelievable. Then, as the numbers continued to grow, the mood became somber? Now what do they do?

That same scenario applies equally today. You’ve built your new Magento eCommerce site. It’s branded to reflect your company image, SEO is effectively in place and you’re getting great visibility and traffic. Orders are coming in, you’re getting paid. But what happens when the calls start coming for support? How will you manage customer requests that can’t be managed in 5 minutes or less and require follow up? What about return requests? What if the caller is a reseller who has special terms and price lists that the call center agent needs to know about when they answer?

These are all key needs that products like SugarCRM address. For growing and successful merchants, you’re online store front is just one piece. Continuing to build the requisite infrastructure needed to handle the call center, latest shipping and billing information from your ERP system, and provide customer interaction history is an important step to ensure your company can scale effectively as online order volume grows.

To solve this issue Magento and SugarCRM are uniquely well paired. As Enterprise class open source applications, each provides the architectural framework to allow these two systems to be tightly integrated so whether you’re taking orders online, on the phone, in the store, or all 3, your customer service team can have one common view and representation of all that is occurring for that customer and your business.

Levementum, as the world’s largest SugarCRM partner, and Magento’s 2011 Emerging Partner of the year, has experience in bringing these two heavy weight champions together in an integrated solution set.

Levementum helped Valtim Marketing Solutions achieve this success by integrating SugarCRM and Magento Enterprise Edition to accommodate all customer touch points.  You can read the brief Valtim Marketing Solutions Success Story for additional information on how this integration helped Valtim achieve the customer and sales success they were looking for with a completely integrated end-to-end solution.

Continue reading »]]> A few questions to consider:

• Is your company one of many that sells not only direct to consumers, but also through partners, affiliates, and/or distribution channels?
• Have you discussed expanding your web presence to capture more online sales but held off because you view your direct to consumer (B2C) business too small to invest in?
• Are you looking to find ways to lower the operational costs (or cost of sales) with supporting your channel sales model to allow investment in other growth areas?
• What about giving your existing sales force the ability to service a larger number of clients, particularly new and smaller ones, without having to invest the same amount of sales time and effort?

One of the recent trends we see is companies that typically sell their goods and services through channel partners (resellers, distributors, affiliates) are looking to augment their traditional field or inside sales model with a more robust ecommerce solution.  For B2B companies, it is common to multiple price lists per customer or customer tier, separate or even bonded inventory, and alternate payment terms and purchasing rules for their different sets of channel partners.

As these companies continue to grow, the cost of expanding their customer base through traditional means not only becomes cost ineffective, but it often results in declining customer value because the typical sales person can only support a certain number of target customers through manual processes.

Enter eCommerce solutions and Magento Enterprise. The Magento solution stack provides the framework for taking all levels of complexities per account or account type, and simplifying them into set or repeatable and high automated workflows that are integrated directly to your ERP system.

This system integration allows for consistent, up to date pricing, inventory levels and lead times, as well as greater customer self-sufficiency.

Levementum was able to create this efficiency for Troxell.  To read more about how this solution helped Troxell and their customers by utilizing eCommerce technology to enable the next level of scale and growth for their sales force, read Troxell’s brief Solution Summary or the complete White Paper.

Continue reading »]]> Compiere Inc., an open source ERP and CRM provider, is growing and getting noticed by key decision makers in the market for ERP applications.  Compiere is the pioneer of open source ERP and is the emerging leader in this application category.  Compiere recently received the award “2008 InfoWorld Bossie Award – Best of Open Source Enterprise Applications“.  As an open source business application, Compiere is an alternative to the traditional proprietary ERP applications like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics.

I have recently evaluated and reviewed Compiere and wanted to outline some of my findings.  I have limited this evaluation of Compiere to some key areas.  For a more exhaustive outline of capabilities and features I would suggest visiting the Compiere website.

Compiere’s solution capabilities span Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).  These include the following capabilities:

• Financial Management (Accounting)
• Sales Order Management
• Materials Management (Purchasing)
• Warehouse Management
• Customer Service (Support & Self-Service)

Role-Based User Interfaces

One of the things I liked most about Compiere is its flexibility to adapt to an organization and to the roles within an organization.  Through years of observation, I have found that 80% of ERP users, use about 20% of the features and functionality that are available to them.  Dealing with the confusion this creates has always been a challenge when implementing some of the traditional ERP solutions.  In Compiere, the ability to tailor a user’s online experience in terms of ‘look and feel’ is defined easily using roles.  Roles are easily setup by an administrator, no development is required.  The menus, windows, forms and fields that are available to the user are all determined by the user’s assigned role.  When roles are established, they are specific to a group of user’s tasks and responsibilities ensuring that the users only see what is required to do their job.  Despite a broad array of features and functionality Compiere makes it easy to provide a simple streamlined user interface to your users.  This easily translates into reduced training and support costs.  Amongst complex applications, I have not seen an easier way to do this – Compiere hit this one out of the park.

Adaptability

Compiere employs an innovative model-driven architecture that gives you unprecedented adaptability, speed of deployment and a lower cost of ownership.  I personally think that Compiere is under-selling this particular capability.  The Compiere ‘Application Dictionary’ is a library of business logic meta-data that can be updated or extended to allow an organization to adapt Compiere to fit the unique requirements of their business.  The level and extent of the customization that can be accomplished using the ‘Application Dictionary’ would require significant development time and effort in any other application.  Compiere allows this adaptability while maintaining easy upgradability.  The time and expense this saves during initial implementation as well as during periodic upgrades contributes to the already lower cost of ownership when compared to traditional ERP solutions.

Warehouse Management

Recently released in Compiere 3.2, Compiere offers one of their best modules to date – WMS (Warehouse Management System).  WMS expands an already solid Materials Management module with a broad range of brand new functionality that automates inbound, warehousing and outbound operations.  This is ideal for organizations that are looking to cut costs, improve productivity, reduce warehouse space utilization or increase customer satisfaction.

At the center of the WMS module is a highly flexible and configurable rules engine for setting up intelligent materials movement through all phases of warehouse management operations.  This expansion of the Materials Management module is offered by Compiere for an additional fee per user or per warehouse.  If an organization only requires basic inventory and materials management functionality, I recommend using the functionality included in the Materials Management module at no additional cost – it is solid and mature.  However, for the mid-size to larger organizations in the distribution, retail or manufacturing industries where the warehouse operations are complex, there are numerous warehouses or the number of items and transactions are  high – the advanced functionality provided by WMS is worth the additional cost.  In situations where you may be looking to cut warehousing costs as it relates to warehouse moves and utilization – Compiere’s WMS solution is worth looking at as either an add-on to a larger Compiere implementation or as part of an integrated ERP solution.

Compiere has expanded their network of partners by about 40% in 2008 resulting in a growing ecosystem of knowledgeable and experienced system integrators ready to help with everything from Compiere support and hosting to Compiere implementation and integration.