A Guide to Retail ERP Systems for SMEs

The customer experience is what all retail experiences revolve around. The best ERP for retail companies should:

• Personalize customer experience by capturing all your customers’ information in the centralized CRM functionality, allowing you to provide tailored offerings and personalized services and recommendations just for them!

• Omni-Channel Integration offers multiple channels, whether it be in-store or online through your e-commerce, while unifying all your sales and integrating them to a centralized sales module within SAP Business One.

• Lightning-fast fulfillment with accurate inventory levels and integrated order management allows your team to efficiently execute and ultimately leads to greater customer satisfaction.

Many businesses with a retail component spend a great deal of time on their retail systems, like point of sale or e-commerce, to improve the experience for the customers, but it can often come at the detriment of your internal team’s experience.

• Centralized Financial Tracking with all sales channels integrated directly into SAP Business One with automatic payment reconciliations and simplified day-end processes.

• Real-time Financial Insights allow for daily reporting to view immediate changes in margins, store performance and expenses to make quicker and better decisions.

• Regulatory compliance ensures that your business runs to the requirements of the country you are operating. Did you know SAP Business One is localized for over 50 countries around the world to keep businesses on track?

As your business grows, you need tools that allow for scalability and flexibility. SAP Business One for the retail industry quickly and efficiently add more sales channels, store locations, and e-commerce platforms, all while keeping the same streamlined process for the organization. So, whether you are processing 100 orders or 10,000 orders a day, the system can handle it all with ease.

Your customers’ experience is only as strong as your ability to deliver the goods they want, when they want them. A key feature of SAP Business One, a leading retail inventory software solution, is its complete real-time visibility across your entire inventory and supply chain network.

• SAP Business One’s retail ERP platform provides you not only with insight into what stock you have and where, but also provides you with an available-to-promise report that allows you to communicate to your customer when a product will be back in stock.

• Multi-Warehouse and location visibility allows you to quickly see what items are in other locations or at your distribution center and request a transfer to your location

• Supplier management tracks order status, supplier performance, and streamlines the entire procurement process across your organization in SAP Business One.

• Automated purchasing allows the requirements across multiple locations to be consolidated, considers demand forecasts and looks at sales trends using intelligent forecasting to ensure you are buying what you need, when you need it!

• Cost reduction is inevitable when you have a big picture view of your supply chain to negotiate better prices and terms with your customer, ultimately reducing waste and lowering costs.

The SAP Customer Checkout Point of Sales has everything you need for the best customer experiences.

• Intuitive User Interface makes it easy to use, so adoption is quick for any new staff

• Integration with SAP Business One allows for real-time synchronization of customers, inventory and sales data.

• Payment processing allows payment to be taken and recorded against the sale immediately.

• Inventory management and stock insight allow inventory to be tracked across all locations in the business.

• Discounts and promotions are applied in accordance with your business rules

• Customer and historical sales data allow for ease of repeat customers and improved customer satisfaction.

• Offline capability allows for the business to keep selling even if the internet goes down, never disappointing a customer.

Our omni-channel retail solution centers around SAP Business One as the core of the digital enterprise, using the integration framework as middleware to seamlessly connect all retail channels into a single hub. For brick-and-mortar stores, we provide SAP Customer Checkout as the POS solution, allowing for a unified and streamlined operation. Additionally, our approach includes integration capabilities with various e-commerce platforms and marketplaces, ensuring a cohesive retail experience across all channels.

• Approximately 21% of retail revenue in North America is expected to be generated via e-commerce in 2025, making it an increasingly important channel for retailers.

• As this channel increases in prominence, the importance of integrating your e-commerce with your ERP is critically important to continue to scale and gain efficiency without duplicating efforts.

• SAP Business One can integrate with any e-commerce platform or marketplace using the Business One integration framework.

See our Shopify packages solution for a robust understanding of integration capabilities.

An ERP system like SAP Business One integrates your entire organization so that the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing

• All orders, whether over the phone, through the POS or e-commerce, all lead back to SAP Business One retail ERP.

• Order entry is simple and will default all critical information like addresses, pricing and discounts, requiring only value-added interventions like promotional information.

• E-commerce integration, like Shopify or Magento, will automatically bring your online orders into SAP Business One with payment!

• Customer Checkout Point of Sale by SAP automatically synchronizes customer profiles, inventory levels, and sales documents. This keeps all your records up to date and relevant!

• The supply chain operations team can accurately manage inventory planning by seeing the status of inventory at each location, ensuring that no single location has too much or too little inventory. Launching a new product in-store? No problem, with a centralized view of all your locations and their capacity, you can ensure the right stores get the right combination of information.

• The finance department benefits from SAP retail ERP by having all information in one centralized system and working with a complete picture of the business. There is no need to export data from external systems and manually manipulate reports to see the bigger picture.

SAP Business One acts as a centralized data warehouse where all sales information related to your customers is consolidated.

• The analytical functionality of an ERP retail system like SAP B1 allows the business to slice and dice information, determine trends over item categories, but also down to a single customer.

• SAP Business One can recommend sales items to customers based on customers like them or based on historical items they have already bought.