ERP
Retail Operations
Keeping up with your competitors isn’t easy. Ever-changing market conditions, aging software, and complicated business processes can all create an environment that makes managing your supply chain harder than it should be.
Keeping up with your competitors isn’t easy. Ever-changing market conditions, aging software, and complicated business processes can all create an environment that makes managing your supply chain harder than it should be. Thankfully, with the right tools, your supply chain management software doesn’t need to lag behind.
In fact, by understanding why the core features of your SCM software are necessary — and how they help your business grow — you can optimize your supply chain to boost your performance.
What you’ll learn:
Why your SCM software features matter
How to use your SCM software to grow your business
What types of data your SCM software and ERP integrations manage
What happens when your SCM and ERP software work together
If this is your first chance to learn about supply chain management software, check out this quick-start guide for retail brands. This breakdown is designed to help retailers like you understand why these features are necessary to develop and grow a business beyond its current size.
Why this feature is necessary. Real-time visibility is the only true way to ensure you know what’s going on in your business. If your software integrations and necessary data are trapped in a black box — worse, obscured by overly complicated workflows, trapped in spreadsheets, or siloed away by disconnected tools — problems are bound to spiral out of control.
How it helps you grow. With real-time visibility, you can catch issues before they have a chance to spread and easily identify new opportunities. It helps you harness the momentum your business thrives on and build a path that matches your trajectory.
Why this feature is necessary. Forecasting is necessary for retail brands because it uses external data to increase the odds that you invest your operating budget into products that will sell. Demand planning, on the other hand, enables your ops team to ensure they have the materials necessary to produce those SKUs (or acquire targeted SKUs from a wholesale vendor).
How it helps you grow. Not every forecast is going to pan out, and not every demand plan will meet the moment. But having a powerful SCM software integration ensures that when these processes fall short, you have the infrastructure available to pivot. An overlooked part of these features is that SCM software can also help you find new vendors, suppliers, or alternate logistics options to get as close as possible to making forecasts a reality.
Why this feature is necessary. It’s one thing to manage your inventory from your internal systems — which an ERP with an inventory management module enables you to do — but you also need to manage any inventory that’s stored in third-party warehousing, sitting on partner shelves, or in transit. An internal inventory management system is only going to track inventory that’s in your warehouses, stores, or being fulfilled by your team.
How it helps you grow. SCM software inventory management helps you optimize your external inventory flow. You could have error-free internal inventory management processes, but if your external inventory management is lacking, you’re still going to experience slowdowns and tied-up operating budgets. When your inventory is properly managed from both fronts, you’re able to move faster, stay lean, and keep your budgets tidy.
Why this feature is necessary. SCM software procurement features help you manage the movement of materials, purchase orders, and automations related to suppliers. Being able to track and gain some control over these workflows can help you dramatically speed up these key processes. Likewise, the right SCM software integration can provide you with a single platform that helps you reconcile your spending and invoicing — which is a huge help for your accounting department.
How it helps you grow. Being able to optimize, revise, and track a key part of your production process can help your ops team find new ways to push your business forward. High-success adjustments to a business plan don’t always come from cracking a new sales strategy. It can come from anywhere — even where you source your materials.
Why this feature is necessary. Closely tied to procurement functions, supplier management is a highly strategic process that growing retail brands need to master (and something the right SCM software integration enables). Sometimes, chasing the lowest prices and good deals can only get you so far. You need to be able to compare vendor reliability, fulfillment speed, and know ahead of time if your go-to suppliers even have the materials you need.
How it helps you grow. With the right integration, you’re able to run your operations with confidence that (outside of anomalies) your vendors and suppliers are reliable — at the speed you need and at an acceptable price. Additionally, SCM software can provide your suppliers with a direct way to interface with your operations, enabling greater communication and tracking of key functions.
Why this feature is necessary. You need a single hub for all your transportation, warehousing, and supply chain planning data. An SCM software integration supplies you with that. You can’t afford a blind spot when it comes to moving your product from warehouse to warehouse, or warehouse to retail location — and you certainly can’t afford to have your supply chain planning tied up in spreadsheets and offline documentation.
How it helps you grow. Proper logistics management ties all supply chain management software features together — you gain real-time data streams and easy management of external information that used to feel a lot more like a black box instead of an open book. When you have complete confidence in your supply chain management, your retail brand can freely scale and take on new markets.
Supply chain management software is designed from the ground up to serve as your business’s interface with external systems and partners. However, these same features are also impacted by the ERP software serving as the backbone of your retail ops. You can use this table to better understand how SCM software and ERP manage the external and internal data that enable these features to work.
| Feature Type | Supply Chain Management Software | Headless, Composable ERP (Tailor) |
|---|---|---|
| Real-Time Visibility | Provides real-time visibility across the external parts of your supply chain, from warehousing, location sales, and partner-based fulfillment. | Provides real-time visibility across your entire system, reconciling delivered supply chain data with your internal data, such as production, inventory management, and accounting. |
| Forecasting and Demand Planning | Delivers and reconciles supply chain data based on variances in external factors to provide recommendations for products to scale up and pull back from. Also aligns business operations to meet the forecast. | Uses internal data, such as materials availability, existing SKU counts, and historical sales metrics, to make recommendations for which products should be focused on. Additionally, it uses human-in-the-loop automation to make materials and process recommendations. |
| Inventory Management | Helps you track inventory that's being held by retail partners, third-party warehouses, and products in transit. | Enables you to track inventory levels at your storefronts, warehouses you manage, and products that are moving through your fulfillment process. |
| Procurement | Identifies vendors who can provide the materials you need to run your production process, and can help you pivot when materials or vendors may be unavailable. | Manages the procurement to payment workflows. As an AI-native ERP, many of these processes can be easily automated with final approvals from decision-makers. |
| Supplier Management | Provides the external connections necessary to interface with suppliers and participate in collaborative workflows as necessary. | Brings your supplier data into a single source of truth, so you and your suppliers can be on the same page. Can also provide your suppliers with access to important documentation hosted in your system. |
| Logistics | Provides you the data you need to plan your supply chain end-to-end, delivering insights into delivery routes, bulk product movement, and the general flow of goods from storage to fulfillment. | Folds your supply chain data into a single platform, enabling your internal process to adapt to external conditions to ensure that you aren't stalled by factors in your control. |
When your SCM software and ERP are connected to each other and work together, you gain unparalleled visibility across (and beyond) your business. Here’s what it looks like when they’re in sync:
Accurate inventory tracking. With real-time sync from your ERP and SCM software, you’re able to quickly reconcile your inventory — wherever it is. This eliminates surprise stockouts, reduces overstocking, and can even prevent customers from buying ghost stock.
More flexible budgets. When your budget isn’t tied up by dead stock, complicated software integrations that require constant maintenance, and poor supply chain management, you’ll have more overhead to tackle new markets. An ERP and SCM integration that is deeply connected removes complexity, which helps your budgets go further.
Clean operational data. A fully connected system with external and internal data streams that are automatically reconciled helps your ops team catch mistakes before they balloon out of control — enabling the easy flow of clean data that helps your business run with confidence.
Tailor’s composable, headless ERP platform provides your SCM software the support it needs to fully manage your supply chain. With a fully modular design that enables you to easily plug in tools and software without lengthy integration cycles, you can hit the ground running on better supply chain management. Tailor itself can be fully integrated in weeks, with phased rollouts and an out-of-the-box UI that’s easy to grasp and adaptable to your teams’ unique needs.
If you’re ready to get the most out of your SCM software features, book a demo with Tailor today to see the platform in action.
AUTHOR
Elijah MacDougall
Connectors
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