72 | Sector Focus: Software


Above: James Mitchell presents the digital strategy for KCS customers at Konnect


◄ standardise product data. This enables them to digitalise a product entirely, from its taxonomy and descriptions, all the way to its measurements.


“This standardised product data can help to maximise stock, getting it into the hands of customers and ensuring that it’s not stuck in the warehouse racking up costs,” continued Mr Lee. “A key component of this is using technology to automate their supply chain operations, driving down costs using electronic data interchange (EDI) processes. With this data centralised in one place, merchants can offer their customers a better buying experience — providing a wider breadth of product choice without having to physically hold every item in stock. “One future challenge that we’re working to address is ensuring that our customers have visibility across their entire end-to-end production and sales process — all the way to delivery,” added Mr Lee. “We’ll continue to develop integration solutions to give our timber customers insight into their extended supply chain. This will enable them to inform their customers directly where their order is in the delivery network, rather than having to rely on third-party delivery companies to provide email updates on their behalf.” Developments reported on in last year’s software focus (TTJ July/August 2022) have been well received, with KCS showcasing its latest apps to more than 400 delegates at its Konnect conference in March this year and noting that demand for these is increasing. “We have introduced warehousing apps not only for customers who operate larger warehouses, but also for those who operate


TTJ | July/August 2023 | www.ttjonline.com


single or multi-branch operations,” said Mr Mitchell. “This enables our smaller customers to take advantage of the control and accuracy that warehouse management can bring, but without the need to introduce full warehouse management. “We also announced the impending availability of yet more digital solutions,” he continued. “These include a Pocket Helper to enable customers to easily view local stocks, pricing and to reserve and purchase together with a Business Tracker, enabling management to easily view and action tasks allocated to them and to approve transactions.” Ten-25 has also brought more functionality into its Merchanter system recently. “We can now do unique item stock control,” said Mr Oldrey. “So for products such as hardwoods that means being able to identify either individual pieces of timber or individual logs as their own entity. It’s a very handy feature. “We have also added a lot more into the system for doing stock management by location. This means the merchant can effectively build a hierarchy of locations within each of their sites so that it is easy to stock take and stock control by them. Most people tend to stock control by depot overall but it is very useful to know that a product is held in [a certain location] within that depot. “The other thing we’ve done is to help new clients who may currently be using either Sage or Quickbooks or Xero as their financials package. We’ve written tools whereby we can extract the customer supply and product data out of those systems to create starting data


for their timber trading system on Merchanter. We can link it back in so they can carry on using their financials as a financials package but it’s a much quicker set up.” Ten-25 has continued its work to enable customers to link Merchanter with third party platforms such as eCommonSense, WooCommerce, eBay, Amazon and Shopify. “We have also linked into things like NearStreet, which is a service that publishes stock and price information within a small geography of where your sites are located,” said Mr Oldrey. “So when people do a Google search for a particular product it says if you’ve got it in stock and what the price is. “Merchants are using other market place sites a lot more,” he continued. “That way they can act as the supply chain to sites that are doing the promotion and the marketing and getting customers in. If you are a local independent merchant it’s great to have your own ecommerce platform but you do have to promote it and really get behind it. It’s useful to be able to supplement that with orders coming through from these other market place sites as well.” Ten-25 is also nearing completion of the first version of a “suggested re-ordering” function.


“Timber requires more competent algorithms than unit product suggested re- ordering does, so we’re quite proud of that,” said Mr Oldrey, adding that once artificial intelligence (AI) enters the frame “it is those tools that are going to make it fly”. Epicor’s BisTrack system is “constantly evolving” said Adam Lee, adding that the company is working to develop and upgrade its capabilities across its markets. “We now have one single global version of BisTrack available, giving us much more efficiency in terms of the functionality we can provide to a wider, broader set of customers,” he said. “We’ve recently introduced a new update to BisTrack which has added detailed capabilities to support product picking – as merchants will often be producing products with variable width elements – and pin drop functionality to enhance delivery accuracy,” added Mr Lee. “This means that even after a product has left the warehouse our customers can ensure that it makes it to its end destination seamlessly, as delivery drivers can access precise delivery location data. This is particularly useful for remote, rural areas with names rather than numbers or larger sites with multiple access points.”


Last year Epicor launched its Automation Studio, giving customers the ability to connect with other software programmes with little or no IT coding needed and the company says its impact has been “widespread”. “It is compatible with a range of our products and services,” said Mr Lee. “We’ve worked with buying groups such as NMBS,


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