TRAILBLAZERS
ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Congratulations Fellow Trailblazers
Modern business management software for merchants is supporting current and future trailblazers enabling their businesses to operate at their best, says Gary Brookshaw, Product Director, at Intact.
Congratulations to all the merchants who feature in this year’s Trailblazers publication! We ourselves feel like a trailblazer with a growing number of
merchants moving to or talking to Intact about our business software solutions and how they support and empower their future ambitions. I’ve worked with many merchants since 1999 and there is a wave who have bought an ERP (Enterprise resource planning) system in that period and are now looking to upgrade again. Technology has obviously changed in that time but what else is causing merchants to perform that ‘heart transplant’ in their business? Again! All ERP software will perform your key business operations in one way or another and, while no software system is perfect, we all enter the partnership with the good intention of improving your business. No doubt you had grand plans after selecting your ERP vendor of choice back in the day but perhaps didn’t quite leverage your investment?
What happened? Maybe, you discovered that you couldn’t quite do something as
expected? It then turned out to be too awkward or too costly to develop / implement. So, momentum faded and you learned to accept systems limitations and you settled into your old ways…
Flexibility The team at Intact don’t accept that this is how business software should perform. We believe your business software should not dictate how you run your business. Our developers got a rare opportunity in the software world - to re-engineer a solution from the ground up. And boy did they take it! We knew from experience that no two companies operate in the same way - even those in the same industry. People needed that ability to customise the solution to cater for their nuances and let them leverage their competitive advantage. But there is no half-way-house when it comes to customisation so
we went all in! Every view, every screen, business rules, highlight rules, alerts, menus, actions, and so many other things can be customised by you - the end user. Our customers are realising hugely impressive ideas and control using this technology and it makes the team at Intact very proud.
The Future But we are not resting on our laurels. When you buy an ERP solution you are not buying it for the next 3 years - it’s a huge investment and commitment for a number of
years.You need a modern solution on a modern platform that is constantly
evolving.It’s easy to get locked into proprietary or outdated technology and it’s a tough cycle to break out of. Constant innovation flows directly to our customers, as no matter how much we modify your solution it remains upgrade-compatible, easy to manage and expand. We also appreciate that platform is key and our users are all different. Whether our customers need Windows, web, smartphone or rugged mobile device access all are catered for and for the right use case.
Merchant Challenges Some of the merchant challenges haven’t changed over the years so it’s key for us at Intact that we help merchants solve these issues effectively. Rebates are a huge part of your business and rebate management has always been a challenge. The flexibility in our solution, Intact iQ, allows you to cope with complex rules or even bring in group results to give a more realistic rebate value. But once you have traceability of this key data then rebate management comes into play.
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This involves easy tracking of progress, pro-active notification of rebates due and where threshold boundaries are close. The administrative savings here are huge. Customer
terms are another key area. Gone are the days of high ticket prices with layers of terms to arrive at a customer’s price. The increase in web trading and blurring of lines between merchants and retailers has led merchants needing a more competitive starting price. You’ll still need terms for some customers but simplification and flexibility of these to aid understanding and management is key. Linked to this is negotiation. Your customers will still want ‘their
price’ so you have to negotiate but the trick here is to minimise and monitor this using some flexible rules. Minimum margin within a product group is unacceptable as products vary so much within that group. Inline overriding of margin exceptions by senior staff aids transaction flow here. Nearly every ITT (invitation to tender) we get talks about ‘ease of use’
and ’simplification of processes’. This is where the flexibility of Intact iQ shines and allows our users to tailor each screen and process to exactly what they need to see. Keep things simple and drill into the infrequent detail when needed. Integration is essential for a modern merchant as there are so many
best of breed systems out there. The framework within Intact iQ allows us to import or export pretty much anything using classic formats like CSV or Excel. But our RESTful API takes things to another level. You can allow read or update access to any object in Intact iQ without any development effort. You can control the whole thing via a visual designer. This is a dream come true for web developers who have traditionally struggled with integrating with ‘hard coded’ web service APIs.
Summary Your business software is critical to your business success. Our mission is to create aspirational business software to help current and future Trailblazers achieve their goals today, tomorrow and ten years from now. Good luck to all of you!
Visit
www.intactsoftware.co.uk to find out more about Intact and how they are empowering merchant businesses to operate at their best.
A supplement to builders merchants journal April 2019
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