Wardrobe Management Software Connects With ERPs

The Smart Red Uniform Management System (UMS) can be a stand-alone platform, and for many organisations it works perfectly in isolation. However, for most uniform, workwear and PPE suppliers, it works best when it’s integrated with core software that’s already part of your business. There are a multitude of systems we integrate with. A non-exhaustive list includes CRMs, payment gateways, business intelligence (BI) software, email systems, text systems, to name a few. 

By far the most common system we integrate with is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, as that’s often the driving software behind any supply business. Smart Red enhances the customer experience, and is often a requirement for end users when selecting their uniform supplier. Therefore, it makes sense to streamline the processes across both these platforms – for staff and customers – to ensure a quick, efficient and most of all, user friendly ordering/order fulfilment process. 

What Functionality Can Be Integrated?

You can choose to partially, or fully, integrate with ERPs, and the specific integrations required may vary based on the needs of your business. Below is a list of the most common functionality we connect between the systems.

Product Catalogue and Pricing

Integration enables real-time synchronisation of product information, including product descriptions, pricing, and images. This ensures consistent and up-to-date product data across both platforms, whilst only having to enter and manage everything in the one place. This is especially beneficial when you first launch Smart Red, as you don’t need to recreate any of your catalogue.

Order Management

Seamless integration enables automatic order processing and updates between the ERP and Smart Red. It ensures that orders placed on the platform are efficiently transferred to the ERP system for fulfilment, without the need for manual intervention (and therefore, the potential for errors). It also instantly links order updates to the push notification system on Smart Red, to keep customers informed every time their order status changes. In short, this keeps your customer communication easy!

Inventory Management

Integrating your UMS and ERP systems allows for real-time synchronisation of stock inventory. This ensures accurate stock levels across both platforms, managing client expectations instantly. You can add ‘expected delivery dates’ or other important data to your customers as part of this integration. 

Customer Management

Integrating both systems enables centralised customer management. Customer data, such as contact information, order history, preferences, customer-specific products, carriage/delivery charges and other key information can be shared between the systems instantaneously, meaning your customers are receiving the service they expect within your contracted terms. 

Financial Management

Integration means that key financial data, such as sales transactions, invoices, and payments can be visible by customers in one area on their order screen on their UMS, but all this information is pulled from your ERP. This reduces the need for customers to ask for repetitive requests such as duplicate invoices and past payment information. Financial controls prevent customers going over their defined credit limit, keeping you protected. 

Shipping and Fulfilment

Integration with shipping and delivery providers enables automated shipping label generation, tracking updates, and inventory updates. This simplifies the order fulfilment process and automatically updates the customer on timescales for delivery. 

Analytics and Reporting

Integration allows for the consolidation of data from both systems, providing comprehensive insights into sales, inventory, past spend and forecasting. This gives your customer more control over their spend and usage, with invaluable data from the UMS to ensure accuracy that’s not available from ERP. 

Which ERP Can Connect with Smart Red?

Smart Red is built upon the Big Red Business Platform, which was designed with integration in mind. Our experience developing and implementing ERP systems means we aren’t limited to integrating with solely one system – as long as your system has published API documentation, and the ability to push/pull the above information, we can connect with it. We may require some support from your provider to help with testing, and any specific development, but we’ll drive this request for you and talk you through the whole process. 

Do I Need an ERP To Implement Smart Red?

No! Smart Red has many of the core features above, so if you don’t have an ERP system, or you’re considering changing, you can use Smart Red as a standalone ordering platform, and choose to manage stock, invoices etc separately. 

You can also phase development so that your Smart Red platform is launched initially, and we can connect partially or fully with your ERP at a later stage. We’re entirely flexible around your business needs, timescales and budgets. 

Let’s Get Started

Let’s start the discussion today to see what your business needs – contact our sales team here and we’ll call you right back.