COVID-19 Recovery of Customers and Supply Chain
Summary
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The COVID-19 pandemic has dropped annual revenue by 50% for most companies. To recover the lost customers, intense communication with those lost customers has to be renewed asap. Tools such as cloud CRM, scheduling of automatic inventory replenishment, standardizing operating procedures, ECommerce, website RFI, RFQ and RFP forms, and enabling access to your customer and vendor portal will help.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the supply chain. Some suppliers shut their doors, or can simply not ship their products because of COVID-19 regulations, or because of too high tariffs. The linked article will give you some guidance to solve those supply issues.
Recovery of Customers
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Most of you have lost about 50% of your customers because their business also dropped by 50%. To get your customers back, I recommend the following actions:
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Connect to your lost customers in the following ways:
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Use the Acumatica CRM more specifically marketing campaigns to email them on your latest plans: https://www.intercs.com/acumatica-crm
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If you have not implemented yet the Acumatica ERP, you can subcribe to just the Acumatica CRM, and add later Acumatica Finance and Distribution.
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If you want to send HTML emails and do a lot of grouping of your prospects, you can use HubSpot and integrate it with the Acumatica CRM: https://www.acumatica.com/blog/technical-tuesday-hubspot-integration-with-acumatica/
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Add Acumatica forms to your website for RFI, RFQ, RFP and events (webinars, training and tech support): https://www.intercs.com/acumatica-integration-with-website
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Set up Ecommerce (B2B) and integrate it with your cloud ERP: https://www.intercs.com/acumatica-commerce-edition
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Sync MS Office 365 with the Acumatica CRM for contacts, emails and events: https://www.intercs.com/acumatica-erp-foundation and click on Exchange Integration. All this information will be automatically available on your smartphone once you add the MS account to your smartphone email accounts.
Recovery of Supply Chain
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The recovery of your supply chain may consist of the following items:
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Finding new vendors
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You can use the purchase requisition tool in the Acumatica Distribution suite:
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Better demand planning
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You can do better and more frequent demand planning. In the inventory module of the Acumatica Distribution suite, you can adjust your future demand.
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For more advanced demand planning, you can use the inventory optimization ISV applications of NetStock, EazyStock or Goods4Cast,
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Better inventory management
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Once you have improved your demand planning, your reorder point and economic order quantity should be improved automatically as long as you keep your inventory up to date, which will be up to date if you complete your product receipts and shipments properly.
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Better vendor supply planning
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You can try to find out the inventory of items you purchase, at the vendor locations by using the SourceDay ISV application.
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An article of the Inbound Logistics magazine gives some more details on supply chain resources and strategies.