Two significant trends for retail ERP

What functionality in our retail ERP is the most sought-after in the global market right now?

We asked Torulf Nilsson, our International Sales Executive, to share his insights.

“Right now, we see two significant trends when we meet global retailers. The main trend is that more retailers are investing in retail-specific ERPs to manage the master data. Many companies find that their old generic ERP for master data management does not fulfill today’s requirements on flexibility linked to the digital omnichannel challenges for large retail chains.

Our Retail ERP is a perfect master data system for large retailers. It provides centralized master data across all stores, legal units, and brands. This enables consistent reporting and smooth store operations, as well as securing one version of the truth throughout the chain. A key feature many retailers also appreciate is the ability to ensure central and local compliance for the master data by allowing only specific employees to make modifications.

Another major trend is to run numerous complex campaigns and promotions, a result of aggressive competition in the global market originating from hard discounters like Aldi and Lidl. We have met retailers that continuously have 50 % of their SKUs on promotion, all with various conditions and target groups. This creates a challenge to ensure consistency between advertised and actual paid prices and calls for a highly efficient and sophisticated Retail ERP with management tools to manage and monitor all concurrent commercial marketing activities.

So a sought-after functionality that our Retail ERP is offering, is the advanced campaign and promotion management structure where retailers can define complex promotions to be valid at any organizational level, for the entire retail chain or groups of stores, down to individual brands, stores, legal units, customer groups or even for individual customers. It is possible to define advanced promotions for product groups, single products, or a mix of products. Popular promotion types right now are mix & match offers (“meal deals”), buy one – get one for free offers, repeating offers (“Happy Friday”), or periodic accumulation (buy x articles over time and get one for free).”