“Let’s put it online” – whether it’s your first project or a big upgrade, it’s easy to see some effects on staff, but today I’d like you to benefit from many years of seeing the hidden side-effects.
e-Commerce Affects the Sales Team
Of course it does… it’s your 24×7 sales person. But what effect does it have? The good effects are usually obvious – reduced inbound calls, more time spent on higher-value sales.
The bad effects are not so clear until they’re causing problems – do they trust the system? Were they consulted and listened to when it was implemented? Has it caused extra work? The sales team need to feel that the new system is helping them to either sell more, or giving them space to work on larger, more complex sales such as tender opportunities.
e-Commerce Affects the IT Team
Of course it does (are you seeing a pattern yet?) – but how? The obvious effects are things like IT getting involved if there’s a problem, IT getting involved when help is needed.
The bad effects are surprisingly similar to the sales team – do they trust it to keep working? Were they consulted during the building of the system? If the IT team don’t want to support the system, then issues will get de-prioritised, and your 24×7 sales person becomes less efficient. Typically, support would be outsources to the agency that built the system, but they will need to work well with your IT team – I have seen many situations where the IT team saw the external agency and the system as a nuisance to be tolerated! This isn’t sustainable and soon begins to show up as long-running issues.
e-Commerce Affects the Marketing Team
In the B2B world, we see two types of project:
- A Marketing team starts the B2B project, to reach new small business customers
- A sales or operations team starts the project, to service large contracted clients
There’s a hidden advantage in involving your marketing staff even for B2B contract clients – if you’re able to measure the success of your project, by involving marketing at the beginning, then you will have an easy time selling the benefits of the system to new clients. For example, if you were able to say “before this system, our client Acme Inc had to telephone Joe each time they needed a new quote, and since using it, all the small day to day business is automated, and Joe has been able to work on new net-zero initiative with the Acme team.”
e-Commerce Affects the Finance Teams
Of course it – hold on, that’s teams plural! A successful project will benefit your clients’ finance teams as well as your own. This is often missed during a sales- or marketing-focused project, but your client’s finance team will be processing the invoices you send, often manually. Or, perhaps you have to manually key your invoices into your client’s “supplier portal”, if they are a large business.
Finance teams love being able to trust the automatically-entered purchase orders, and when the invoices automatically match up to the orders – suddenly James in accounts is able to spend more time on that year-end project, instead of re-keying your invoices.
e-Commerce Affects the Warehouse Teams
Of course it does – but have you spotted all the issues that might be caused, good and bad?
Test yourself against this list:
- Orders begin to appear in a different format – are they ready for it?
- Stock moves more quickly – is the picking and packing process able to cope?
- Buyers may want automatic shipment tracking – can you provide this?
- Multiple shipping addresses – if you give this ability to clients, can your warehouse cope?
- Partial shipments – does your website handle this, and can the warehouse team record it?
- Shipping cost calculation – your website is now calculating shipping. Are you tracking real costs?
- FOB, FCL and international – will your system route orders to the right warehouse or factory?
- Pallet calculation – will your system calculate using the right pallet size, and appropriate delivery method for a given number of pallets?
e-Commerce Affects the Management Team
Of course (you get the idea now…). You’ll have a way of measuring sales performance, profitability, stock movements and replenishment, returns, delivery failures and other vital numbers. An e-Commerce project could completely change which numbers are important – for example, if you measure “error rate on order keying”, and now that’s always zero, it’s no longer needed. A more subtle example – if you had stock replenishment levels set when stock moved weekly, or there’s a delay in updating website stock, and now you are shifting a product more quickly, you could easily over-sell a discontinued item.
e-Commerce Affects You
Of course, you can reduce all these negative impacts by calling us – bring decades of experience into your project by contacting the Get John team today: https://getjohn.co.uk/contact/
