We have restarted our membership of the IWIC co-working space. Good to be out and about and see other people in a work environment.

Today we managed the successful cutover to Tiptree.com’s new Magento 2 Exact Globe eCommerce system.

What better way to celebrate than a trip to the Tiptree Tea Room & Jam Shop at The Jam Factory, Tiptree

One of our favourite clients was recently featured in a Drapers Record article about their launch on the Tmall eCommerce service in China. Proverb2 project managed the integration of Radleys OMS with Tmall.

See the full article here

Last week, Suffolk Socks decided to move from Magento 1.9.X community edition to Shopify. As this client is particularly close to Proverb2 (i.e. my wife) we offered to work the weekend to get it moved over before the Xmas hols.

The project was started on Friday evening and by Sunday teatime everything on the migration plan was ticked off!

The client is very pleased with the new site (and admin panel) and we are happy that we no longer have to worry about Magento 1.9 security patches 🙂

www.suffolksocks.com

The switch to turn OFF  Conversation View in Android Gmail has now started working! Looking forward to not missing important emails.

The first half of this year has been very much focused on the introduction of the GDPR regulation. We have helped a number of clients implement their GDPR action plans.

• Increased security for accessing systems with personal data
• Rationalisation of customer marketing preferences
• Implementation of “Double Opt-In” to ensure valid in-store signups
• Set up of processes to handle Subject Access Requests and “Right to be forgotten”

While our retail clients concentrate on operations during the Xmas peak trading period, we still manage to work with their suppliers to develop and test functional improvements for their systems. Now that January 2018 is upon us we can deploy those changes to their production systems. So far we have managed the deployment of changes to:

• Point of Sale
• Warehouse Management Systems
• Integration Services
• Order Management Systems

If you require any project management service in relation to your retails or e-commerce systems then please get in touch.

You have survived Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but are you ready for Office Advent Calendar SUPER MONDAY?

Today in thousands of offices across the world, Advent Calendars face their first load spike of the season when demand is expected to TRIPLE as office workers returning from their weekend hit the calendars hard.

Not only will today’s door be opened but those workers allocated doors for Saturday and Sunday will be rushing to catch up and see what is behind them.

Once this rush is over, there will be little time to recuperate as Office Advent Calendar SUPER MONDAY is predicted to repeat twice more this year before the big day!

 

If you would like help with system capacity planning for next year’s peak trading then please get in touch.

Electronic receipts – which are emailed to the customer after an in-store or telephone purchase -are becoming more and more popular with retailers. Proverb2 recently managed a project to implement electronic receipts for one of our fashion retail clients.

The Benefits of offering Electronic Receipts are wide ranging

• Environmentally friendly
• Improved customer experience (no paperwork, therefore, no bulging purse or wallet, less chance of losing the receipt, faster process when returning or querying orders)
• The receipt gives an opportunity to communicate with the customer, strengthening the relationship
• Improves email marketing sign up rate

 

The solution chosen by the client was yReceipts which is a cloud-based electronic receipt service already used by many UK retailers. The service is really quick to set up and had the added advantage of already being integrated with the client’s EPOS system. At the end of the transaction, the customer is given the choice of electronic or paper receipt (or both) and then the email address is captured (if it is not already known). The customer details and the transactions details are sent to the yreceipts server. The email, with the receipt attached as a PDF, is sent by yreceipts and arrives within a few seconds of completing the transaction.

The Project

As the integration was already in place the largest work packages in the project were

1. To re-design the sales business process to incorporate the capture of the email address and the receipt preference
2. Design the layout and information displayed on the emails and the attached PDF receipt

Once this was in place we thoroughly tested the solution on the bench before carrying out a pilot in a couple stores. After a couple of tweaks to the process and information shown on the receipt, the solution was rolled out nationwide and is in now in use. Take up is very good, with many customers opting to have receipts electronically.

Top Tips

Here are few things to look out for when implementing an electronic receipt solution

• Ensure that customer experience during checkout is not adversely affected, no introduced delays or complexity
• Ensure that all sales staff are briefed and are aware of the new transaction process
• As always, test thoroughly and also regression check other transaction processes (e.g. email signed up)
• Check with your QSA that your PCI compliance scope is not affected
• Perform a pilot to check & refine the process and customer experience before roll out

If you require any help project managing this or other retail systems initiatives then please get in touch.

This year has been very busy for the Proverb2 team in the area of 3rd Party Logistics projects for our retail and wholesale clients.

3rd Party Logistics is the use of an outsourced service provider to provide one or more of the following:

• Warehousing
• Transport
• Fulfillment to end customer, either wholesale client or consumer

Benefits

The benefits to retailers & wholesalers of using 3PLs include:

• Outsourcing allows the retailer/wholesaler to concentrate on their core business – buying and merchandising
• Pre-integration – good 3PL providers will probably already have integrations in place with:
  • Carriers, so these do not have to be rebuilt for each of their clients
  • Wholesale clients, Many 3PL’s already fulfilled to larger end clients so they already know the relevant documents, labels and sign off procedures
• Local knowledge of carrier services, customs & customer touchpoints

Projects

The projects that we have managed so far have been focussed on delivering cross organisation, back office solutions for:

• A fashion retailer which has expanded their B2C online web presence into the Far East using a local 3PL provider. This solution went live in July.
• A wholesale manufacturer fulfilling orders direct from their Far East factory to large US based retail client via a US 3PL warehouse and logistics provider. This went into production this month.
• We are currently working on a solution to allow a retail client to sell its goods via a popular Far East online marketplace fulfilling from a global 3pl provider with a Far East warehouse.
• We have also been helping for a local start-up 3PL provider, guiding them on their IT strategy for a system to manage their 3PL business. In the end, we have recommended they have a custom system built and put them in touch with a software house.

Golden Rules of 3PL projects

We have found few “golden rules” when embarking on a retail/wholesale 3PL project:-

• Try to find a 3PL who already fulfils goods to your wholesale client using your preferred carrier – this will greatly reduce the amount of integration/dev work required
• If your 3PL is overseas then it is beneficial to have a local client representative that can make decisions and knows how 3PL operate in that area. It is also useful to arrange project checkpoints that fit in with the local working day
• As with all Wholesale projects make sure you allow time to get end client approval for any integration messages and business documents – nobody like a non-compliance chargeback!
• Treat the 3PL like “black box”, review how they work in terms of Standard Operation Procedures but try not to get “in the loop” on their internal processes i.e. try not to get your systems involved in any way with picking, packing or dispatching the order, just leave it to them
• Although they can customise their operating procedures, 3PLs have pretty long lead times on getting their IT systems customised. If at all possible, try to design the solution so they do not have to change anything at their end

Hope these are useful, if you would like any help with starting or managing an in-flight 3PL project then please contact  [email protected]

One of Proverb2’s online retail clients was having a few problems with their marketing emails.

• No regular publication
• Limited measurability (reach, uptake etc)
• Poor preparation of content
• Lack of co-ordination between promotions and marketing emails

So we developed a monthly process in which Proverb2 manages the client to prepare, publish and measure their marketing emails.

The process involves:

• Monthly review sessions to:
  • Review the performance of the last newsletter
  • Plan the next issue and set the goals, agree content and target date
  • Assign tasks, with completion dates, to accountable individuals
• Then a set of checkpoints is held to track progress during the build:
  • Product set up/checks for any items mentioned in the publication
  • Promotional offer set up
  • Publication production
  • Acceptance test and sign off
• Publication of the Newsletter
• Analysis of performance

The work is carried out by the client’s staff with Proverb2 providing the project management element. This helps keep the external cost to a minimum.

This process has been running for a few months now and has shown great improvements.

• Subscribers up by 45%
• Click throughs have doubled
• The client is now seeing conversion rate of ~2% up from 0

We are now offering this marketing publication project management service to all our retail clients. If you are interested in this service then please contact [email protected]

We use Odoo (aka openERP) on our multi channel trading platform for all purchasing, warehousing, manufacturing, CRM and financial functions. After attending the Odoo10 tour in February. We could see there were significant benefits to using this new version.

• Improved UI & Stability for business users
• Improved Point of Sale system
• Re-write of the Warehouse module (now called Inventory)

So we took the plunge and decided (in consultation with our platform tenants) to upgrade the platform to this new version. Our existing webstore to OpenERP connector did not support Odoo10 so we needed to find a new version.

We choose the Odoo Bridge For Magento (MOB) bridge product from Webkul.com. After installation on the staging environment and initial sync of data with the web storefront, we ran a number of tests to check business processes. A couple of minor issues were resolved by the Webkul support team, very quickly. We then repeated the install on production and all is working well.

For data migration we performed a stock take prior to the change and then used the web store front as the stock master during the transition. The only other data migrated is cost price which has been done using the Odoo export/import functions.

Today we successfully deployed the first change of the year to one of our clients warehouse management system. The change covered a number of functional changes which were designed & developed during peak trading for release in the New Year. These included a new returns courier service and fast track shipment handling for remote destinations.

Last week saw the completion of all scheduled system upgrades by Proverb2’s retail clients for 2016. They have now entered into a change freeze to let system and process changes bed in well before they are challenged by peak trading over the Christmas period. The suspension of system changes during this period removes the risk of introducing any new problems through code or configuration changes (which can occur even with careful regression testing).

Each year Christmas peak trading ecommerce order volumes are higher than previous years, here are a few of the changes recently implemented to help our clients cope with this year’s demand.

Platform Upgrade for Redmoped.co.uk

One of our food and beverage retailer clients online business is growing at a fast rate and they were worried that the service level they offered their customers would suffer this peak trading period. There main bottleneck was the manual transfer of data between their web storefront and on premise ERP system. To overcome this we migrated them onto a SaaS ERP system (ExactOnline) and integrated it with their web site (which we also replaced with a new Magento storefront), carrier and email marketing system. The system went live in September and the client is now enjoying automated order management and increased international sales due to the new destination based delivery charges provided by Magento.

Virtual Stock Pooling

Another client of ours had an issue at their warehouse where replenishment orders for their web pick face sometimes caused the destination location to become overloaded. The solution involved a modification to the clients Warehouse Management System to implement a “Virtual pool” in which to hold the replenishment orders. This pool is then depleted by a “draw down” job which periodically checks to see if there is space in the web pick face. If there is space then the system automatically creates warehouse transfers to fill the web pick face with stock from the virtual pool. Proverb2 managed the specification, development and testing of the solution which was deployed last week.

Stock out handling

It is a fact of  life that no matter how good your inventory management systems and processes are, sometimes a product is not physically available to pick when a customer order is being fulfilled. It’s not uncommon that this occurs on the fast selling items, which then results in “over selling” on products that the systems thinks are available but, for which, no stock physically exists. One solution for this, which was implemented in the summer, is to automatically suspend an item from sale on the web storefront as soon as a picking problem is reported at the warehouse. The solution also alerts a “hit squad” of stock controllers and merchandisers who then investigate the issue. If some stock for the affected item is located then the item can be unsuspended

Over the winter we will be managing the specification, development and test of the next set of changes for release to production in the New Year. This will be carried out more directly between Proverb2 and the clients suppliers to allow the client to focus on the operationally intensive peak trading period.

While attending a trade show in Bedford this weekend I popped over to Bletchley Park to visit the National Museum of Computing and met up with a few old friends 🙂

Remember the dreaded RAM pack wobble!

As a trainee technician I once connected two of these VT220s back to back and tried to fool my colleagues that I had an AI program running on the mainframe.

These Transputers were the future once.

I am sure the seat outside Fenwicks cafe in Newcastle was actually a Cray supercomputer.

Source code
10 PRINT “Jon is King  “;
20 GOTO 10
This is not on github.

A mate of mine once carried once of these around a trade show, as it was soo portable!

The Oric Atmos was not particularly acceptable in the 80s, but I bought one.

Wow, feeling so nostalgic I could bubble.

Osborn, the first laptop!

There was a sign saying “Do not touch” otherwise I would have knocked up a quick program using the front panel of this PDP11.

I used to be able to type quite quickly on the Agenda personal organiser.

Well worth a visit if you are in the area. TNMOC

 

Today we implemented live web chat for suffolksocks.com using the Formilla Magento web plug in. Hassle free installation and easy to customise to match the look and feel of the Suffolk Socks site.

Suffolk Socks are hoping that this real time communication channel helps increase conversion to the site by putting sales staff in direct communication with customers.

We completed the last of this year’s back office systems deployment for Radley and Co this week ready for their peak trading change freeze.  We have project managed a number of developments this year including:

• Despatch bench printing streamlining
• Introduction of electronic international invoices
• Introduction of new click and collect carrier
• New international delivery services

Atrium Studios, providers of office and studio space for artists and small businesses, relaunched today following relocation to a new area within UCS. Proverb2 project managed the relaunch event and a refresh of the website. The was the first official engagement for new project Manager Lucy Walters. The launch event, held at the studios, was a great success with a large turnout of local artists and businesses.

Trainee project manager Lucy Walters started at Proverb2 today. Lucy has several years retail sales and back office experience and has decided to move into project management. We are hoping that Lucy’s design experience (she is a graduate of UAL) will allow Proverb2 to expand into new areas.

www.suffolksocks.com a brand new online retailer launched today. This new online business provides an exclusive collection of wool and related products for sock knitters.

Proverb2 managed the implementation of the platform together with production of content for the initial product range. The business is the first to use the Proverb2 MultiChannel Trading platform which is in development.

Proverb2 signed a contract with Dunelm to provide project management services to the IT projects department. Proverb2 will help with the demand for new projects generated by this multichannel retailer’s rapid growth in sales.