With new technological developments, a wave of new innovative solutions are released. Innovation can bring significant benefits to your customers and consequently to your business. However, adopting innovations also presents risks.
Whenever you add a new IT system you should also consider the costs attached to using that system.
If your system is part of a manual process it might increase your team’s workload and you also need to consider the training costs. I’ve seen companies where management decided to implement a new fancy solution but they did not train the people to use the new system, thinking that the built-in interface was self-explanatory. The rollout did not go as planned and the employees ended up using both the old and the new system with each system holding only partial data. Needless to say, this increased the workload and added delays to the whole process. They ran like this for quite some time before deciding to integrate the involved systems and automate the process.
If the system is part of an automated process, or you want to automate a process with the new system, then you should consider the effort required to connect that new system with the rest of your IT infrastructure.
Let’s consider a practical use case.
You manage a business that sells multiple product lines in physical and dedicated online stores.
While preparing for your quarterly review you notice that your BI dashboard report indicates a slow and steady decline in revenue generated by returning online customers. You suspect the increased market competition to be the source of this decline but you decide to do the analysis the right way and collect some data before making any changes.
So you run some surveys, analyze customer feedback, and talk to focus groups. It turns out that your customers like your products but they’re not happy with the order delivery process. It’s never clear when they will receive their order and they consider the shipping costs to be high.
Looking for a solution to this problem you discover Milkman. Milkman is a delivery management solution that can generate delivery options tailored to customer preferences. By using AI for route optimizations and fleet management Milkman can also help reduce delivery costs.
To get the most out of the Milkman solution you’ll need to integrate it into your eCommerce checkout process. You already have a Managed Integration Solution to connect your IT systems (PIM, eCommerce, CRM, Wharehouse) and you can make use of existing integration flows and connectors to connect to Milkman.
Here is how this would work:
- After the user selects the delivery address, the eCommerce solution requests delivery options from the Integration Middleware.
- The Integration Solution takes into consideration the requested delivery address and the product availability reported by your warehouse management solution to generate the query for the Milkman System based on the selected delivery address. Tip: The integration solution could request delivery options for multiple delivery locations selected by the customer.
- Milkman Smart Promise calculates the delivery rates and returns the delivery options.
- The Integration Solution maps the delivery options to the format required by the e-commerce solution and sends it the required info.
- Now the user can select the location, time interval, and delivery cost that are best suited to his/her needs.
- After the user finalized the order, the eCommerce solution sends the order details to the Integration Solution.
- The Integration Solution sends the Milkman Order creation request and attaches the packages to the created order.
- After the order was registered and the packages were attached, the Integration Solution sends the order tracking information to the eCommerce solution and generates a notification for the Warehouse management system.
If any error is generated during the above-mentioned process, the Integration Solution will generate and send an error notification to the system administrator and to the monitoring dashboard so that the issue can be fixed ASAP.
This is just a simple use case of how integrating a delivery management solution can help your business.
If you’re interested in discussing more ways you can automate your business process with integration feel free to reach us via the following contact form: Apply as Client
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