Openbravo for Retail offers a complete
functionality for multichannel retailers, from Sales and Customer Relations to Finance and Operations. Its HTML5 web POS can be run on modern tablet devices,
helping to improve dramatically the employees productivity and customer buying experience.
However, Openbravo for Retail is not only
intended for pure retailers. Are you a distributor who is struggling with your
mobilized sales force? Do you have trucks, and lack of complete control over
their inventory levels in order to ensure they can fullfill all orders? Do you
want to provide your drivers with a powerful tool that helps them to avoid data
entry errors, improve your data quality and therefore provide support for a better
decision making process?
If you have answered positively to some of
these questions, Openbravo for Retail is also a solution for you !.
Let me illustrate it with a simple business
scenario. Imagine you are wholesaler who has a fleet of 3 trucks. Each driver
follows a different route and sells and delivers directly to your customers.
How Openbravo for Retail could help you? :
- Create each truck as a store in the Backoffice. Trucks are in fact mobile stores, right? In this way you will be able to assign to each truck a price list, an assortment and a warehouse. Maximum flexibility!
- Having an assigned warehouse, will let you control exactly the stock level of each truck, either at the end of the journey if they don't have internet connectivity, or in real time if they have it, by synchronizing orders automatically with the Backoffice. This real time scenario, will let you decide to replenish a truck during its route, for example in the event of an unforseen new order or a higher ordered quantity of some products. No more stockout situations!
- After that, you can set up a single POS terminal per truck, with its allowed payment methods
- At this point, you arm each driver with a tablet. In the Central Office, at the beginning of their journey, they connect to the corresponding POS url to synchronize the initial master data : products, prices, promotions and customers. Better data quality for minimizing data entry errors!
- If your customers can pay in cash, you will give some change to your drivers. By creating a deposit, you can easily register the ammount for each POS. Total control over the managed cash!
- Openbravo for Retail is a full web application, but it doesn't require to be on-line:
- Drivers have connectivity : all the orders will be synchronized automatically to the Backoffice, which gives you real time visibility about the served orders and remaining stock on each truck
- Drivers don’t have connectivity : not a problem at all! Openbravo Web POS can be run offline. Drivers can do their job and synchronize all the information later in the Central Office
- Armed with his tablet, the driver will start new sales, by selecting products and/or customers, creating new customers or applying automatic or manual discounts. Discounts and other options can be securized. Peace of mind about what each driver can do!
- Do you need to provide a receipt for the transaction? The best option in this scenario would be to use a bluetooth printer. If card payments are possible, you could use an external payment device, integrated or not with the Web POS (see Note 1). Get maximum benefit from the solution interoperability capabilities!
- For customers who pay later, you can use the credit sales functionality
- At the end of the journey, your drivers will be able to close the day, thanks to the Cash Up functionality, a guided step-by-step closing process that updates all your financial accounts in the Backoffice. Full integration with the financial module!
- Now you can replenish each truck and update their stock levels in the system (by using their associated warehouse) and be prepared for the next day!
- In case you pay commisions to your drivers, it is really simple to calculate and process them
- If you are also interested on a graphical information about the geographical spread of your customers, a better track of your trucks routes, or just a clear information about the customer adress you can think on integrating with solutions like Google Maps (see Note 2)
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| Picture 1 : Orders in a map |
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| Picture 2 : Customer Address |
Note 1: integration with a bluetooth printer or with a payment gateway can require customization
Note 2: Google Maps integration is not provided out-of-the-box, and is only available today in the Openbravo's online demo as an illustrative example. A Google Maps API for Business license is necessary for internal use
In case your drivers simply deliver the previously ordered merchandise (through any of your sales channels), you can also use the capabilities of the Openbravo 3 Mobile platform.
Do you have an existing headquarters
solution that must be maintained? No problem. You will be able easily to
integrate Openbravo for Retail with it.
If you want to learn more about Openbravo for
Retail, visit our website retail section and read the solution description.
Enjoy and happy Retailing!
Xavier Places
Openbravo's Reail Lead
