8 Parts to a Robust Integrated Retail Management Solution

If you want your retail stores to run smoothly and with fewer problems, you need an end-to-end retail management solution. A good solution will come with some essential components. These eight components are perhaps the most important parts of any retail management solution. Don’t install your solution without them.

1. Point of Sale – Let’s start at the cash register. A good retail management solution should include a system to manage your sales and customer points of contact.
2. Web Marketplace Integration – Turn your online store into an extension of your brick-and-mortar stores.
3. Product Management – Manage your inventory from the point of ordering from your suppliers to the point when the customers makes her purchase.
4. Mobile Marketing – Today, mobile isn’t just another aspect of retailing. It’s an essential part of your business. Go one step beyond Web integration and market your stores and products to your customers on their personal devices.
5. Analytics – If you expect to make your business more efficient, more profitable, and more customer-focused, then you need analytics. But you really need the kind of analytics that are easy to track and report and that tell the story of your business. If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.
6. Warehouse Management – Beyond merely tracking your inventory, warehouse management involves the layout of your warehouses so that you can manage them more efficiently, find your products faster, and maneuver them more effectively to be put in front of your customers.
7. CRM – You cannot run a retail store effectively without managing your customers and their needs.
8. Accounting – Once you have all the processes in your retail chain under control, it’s time to integrate your accounting into the rest of your retail processes.

There are other components to a good retail management solution. There’s planning (OTB), operations management, and much more. However, these eight components are essential to any end-to-end solution that you want to install and make your retail chains more efficient and profitable. Of course, you want a solution that will play nice with what you already have. A customized solution is what you need if you already have some of these components.