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Frictionless Supply Chain Solution 

Integrated with E-Commerce, Marketplace, Warehouse, Order & Product Management

YANTRA Commerce has teamed up with Ultra Commerce to support a unique, fully integrated platform for B2B Manufacturing to streamline your order processing to provide a frictionless customer experience and to drive growth.

Key Highlights

Platform Capabilities:
  • B2B, D2C and marketplace 
  • Core commerce
  • Order, product, and content management 
  • Warehouse management 
  • Cutting edge integrated platform 
  • Complete system and business visibility control tower 
  • Cloud-native 
Immediate Benefits:
  • Grow your business 
  • Automate sales orders
  • Reduce manual work 
  • Boost customer satisfaction 
  • Flexible module approach for your digital journey 

Want to Know More?

Download Solution Sheet
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Making Your Supply Chain Work For You 

YANTRA Commerce provides a suite of products designed to support and optimize supply chain functionality for the future. Our solutions have been implemented in various customers to help meet the gap for multiple supply chain needs. To learn more, check out below how one of our customers benefited by using YANTRA Commerce for both as a warehouse solution provider and as a UI provider.

Case Study: YANTRA WMS & YANTRA Mobile

Customer Problem: 

An educational supplies and furniture company needed a warehouse management system to better manage the huge shift in volume between their off-season and peak season.

During peak season, the DCs would ship up to 125k order lines per day. Given these high order lines, delays were not an option. But due to the off-season and peak season dynamic, temporary workers were employed, which would lead to inevitable mistakes and over a thousand tickets annually with 24 hours of required support. Therefore, it was necessary to find out how to identify errors and ticket patterns early to allow the cause to be addressed and the issue to be resolved quickly.

YANTRA Solution:

YANTRA Warehouse Management System and YANTRA Mobile were implemented to help solve these problems faced by the customer.

The customer used several ‘off line’ tools to manage the floor staffing and performance.  This lead to numerous issues.  With our YANTRA Warehouse Management System, we highlighted how the WMS audit data with a reporting solution can provide real time stats. This gave the ability for the warehouse operations leads and managers to accurately forecast and track the floor/capacity.  

Given the flexibility of YANTRA WMS, we were able to accommodate for the rapid and sudden supply changes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, we were able to enable the customer to rapidly test, deploy new shipment lanes, and adjust WMS workflows to shift from using parcel to US mail.

Additionally, with the implementation of YANTRA Mobile, we gave the client the capability of using various smart tablets or scanners.  Since their employees were temporary workers this allowed less training required as smart technology is familiar to anyone using a smart phone, which as a result, greatly reduced user-related errors.

In conclusion, with our combined solutions and expertise, we developed a process that was specifically designed to identify ticket trends and deduce the root cause of any issues. For one example, we determined that all of the shipment waves that were getting stuck were associated with a common customer. Once the core problem was identified, it was fixed within minutes.

YANTRA Value-Add

Our team members identified areas of improvements including performance auditing, purging, replenishment flows, and shipment carrier management. This lead to:
 

  • Improved customer satisfaction ratings by 20% 
  • 50% reduction in resolution time for production issues
  • Better analysis and faster identification of ticket trends
  • 100% reduction in annual tickets and support efforts needed
  • Easy to scale up support during peak season
  • Free up in-house development resources to work on new initiatives rather than supporting production
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Modeling a B2B Frictionless Delivery Experience 

The global B2B e-commerce market size is valued at more than $6.6 trillion, which is approximately six times larger than the B2C market and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.7% from 2021 to 2028, as per Grand View Research. The COVID-19 pandemic is further expected to accelerate the growth of online businesses. 

Despite the large market size, fast paced growth, and complex business operations in the B2B commerce space, the focus of most enterprises have largely remained towards optimizing the B2C commerce customer experience. 

The objectives of B2B e-commerce solutions are typically different than those of B2C. The relationship with the B2B customers tends to be long-term, recurring in nature, and has a higher incentive or penalty at stake.

The B2B order management solution is an integral part of the B2B commerce space that forms the foundation for managing seamless B2B business operations. The selection of a B2B OMS, its implementation, and its short-term or long-term value is not often straightforward. These items can vary based on the business domain, scale of business, and business trends.

Core B2B Order Management Objectives

Apart from the software selection for implementation, the B2B Order Management Solution for any organization should be designed to primarily serve the following key objectives:

Predictability 

The solution should contribute to the predictability of the supply and demand for all the collaborators upstream and downstream in the supply chain. This can be achieved by providing near-real-time visibility beyond just supply and demand to include exception events.

For example, one of the primary reasons for inefficiency in the supply chain is caused by variance in the procurement and fulfillment lead times for SKUs. The implementation of a B2B OMS solution should consist of classifying SKUs with greater impact to business and defining business rules to identify the events causing the variance. Additionally, the successive phases should focus on sharing this information with the collaborating entities for effectively managing these exceptions.

Flexibility 

The implementation should be flexible to accommodate vendor specific requirements and handle complex order management workflows.

For example, various SKU Categories, Order Types, Transportation Modes, etc. often require different order process flows and handling. All aspects of the order life cycle from procurement to sales, including handling of delays, discrepancies, vendor claims, and rebates should be automated requiring minimal manual intervention. Furthermore, it is also critical to reduce the vendor onboarding time to support competitive and fast-growing business.

Measurable Impact

The solution should contribute a measurable impact on business parameters and provide a return on investment in the form of improved operational efficiency.

For example, overall inventory stock should be optimized with the improvement of:

  • On Hand to Promised Stock ratio
  • Order Fill Rate
  • Order Cycle Time
  • Order Claims Rate
  • On-Time-In-Full (OTIF)
In Summary

The B2B OMS is the engine in the B2B commerce space. A B2B OMS ideally should have elements of all the above listed capabilities for managing complex business rules, synchronizing inventory across multiple channels, seamlessly handling the order life cycle, tracking the vendor performance, and overseeing supply chain efficiency. 

How Can YANTRA Commerce Help?

YANTRA Commerce has helped standardized the B2B order management space and enabled global inventory visibility for a variety of different Fortune 500 companies across 130 divisions, 12,000 distributors, and 290 DC while handling 100k+ SKUs with their multiple combinations. 

To learn more about how YANTRA Commerce can help you optimize your B2B Commerce Solution requirements please contact us here. Our team consists of top industry resources who have collectively executed over 100 projects in the supply chain domain in the last decade. We collectively have over 300 years of experience in the Supply Chain Management, Inventory Management, and Logistics Management business functions.  

About the Author, Abhishek Mishra 

Abhishek is a Supply Chain Consultant with 18 Years of experience in implementing and optimizing e-commerce, B2B commerce, multi-channel order fulfillment, and inventory management solutions for some of the world’s leading organizations to help them improve their order and inventory management operations. 

 

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Modeling a Frictionless Customer Delivery Experience

Consumer’s expectations are evolving. More than ever, consumers are wanting a more flexible, reliable and quick shopping and delivery experience. Can your fulfillment solutions keep up? Discover what today’s consumers consider the most important when choosing where to buy and learn how YANTRA Commerce can provide a frictionless customer delivery experience.  

Top B2C Consumer Expectations 

Detailed Inventory Visibility 

  • View if items are in-stock or out-of-stock in various store locations
  • See more details regarding an item’s availability status, not just if the item is in or out of stock

 Reliable Cross Channel Support 

  • Detailed order status via any channel
  • Consistent cross-channel pricing
  • Buy online, return in store
  • Store associates can complete an online order for an item that is out-of-stock in store
  • Interact with a retailer via a mobile device while in store shopping
  • Start an order on one platform and change it or complete it in another

Consistent Item Fulfillment 

  • In-stock on items they want to buy
  • Store associates can quickly and efficiently find an out-of-stock item at an in-stock location and provide options to deliver this item to the consumer

Quick, Reliable, and Convenient Delivery 

  • Consistent accurate, on-time delivery
  • Provide delivery as quick as the next-day, same-day or within the next hour
  • Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS)

How Can YANTRA Commerce Help?

YANTRA Commerce offers a suite of products to help you deliver the perfect customer experience-oriented supply chain. 

YANTRA Warehouse Management System

  • Track, monitor, and manage all inventory
  • Real time visibility into your inventory to allow you to accurately report and update your customers on product availability
  • Supports multi-site management with a single instance
  • Quickly roll out custom processes by site or customer 
  • Flexible task-based operations
  • Rapid deployment templates

YANTRA Inventory Management System 

  • Is a lite WMS that supports a hyperlocal model
  • Track, monitor, and manage all assets and events 
  • Supports multi-site management with a single instance
  • Manage transfers, replenishments, depreciation, quality checks, and assignments all from one tool 
  • Optimize asset and repair management for equipment 
  • Customizable alerts for inventory expiry and use FEFO/FIFO to also manage inventory 

YANTRA Mobile 

  • Is a modern, user friendly execution tool for your warehouse employees
  • Enables efficient order filling to ensure that the committed delivery dates to your customers are met
  • Can run on any mobile device that supports HTML5
  • Adapts to any device size
  • Auto suggest feature
  • Extensible and scalable framework

YANTRA Control Tower

  • Provides oversight into your end-to-end order processing to ensure you meet all customer expectations
  • Proactive and customizable monitoring and alerts of all systems
  • Automated supply chain workflows and issue resolution
  • Produces business and system data reports and strategic insight

YANTRA Connect 

  • Simplifies integration between third party applications
  • Allows for seamless system interaction to provide a consistent cross channel shopping experience
  • Real time B2B transaction visibility
  • Drag-and-drop designer with visual data mapping and debugging

YANTRA Reverse Logistics 

  • Track detailed return status
  • Manage repairs for the customer
  • Control how returns are processed
  • Automate stock transfers and consolidations
  • Automate routing to processing facilities or third parties
  • Manage refurbishment

YANTRA Subscription

  • Offer customers the convenience of automated subscription orders
  • Automate soft reservations, order creation and delivery scheduling for future orders
  • Manage subscription orders via UI or headless
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Increase Revenue and Brand Loyalty

More and more companies are offering subscription services and it is working. Especially due to the current COVID pandemic, customers are more than ever looking for consistency and predictability on the products they rely on without the need to think about it. Retailers are also seeing this benefit because they have a better visibility in future demands.

In a subscription model, consumers only make the decision to buy once. And as a result, future orders are automatically scheduled and can be easily adjusted by the customer. From just that single buying decision, revenue increases, the number of brand impressions grow, and customer loyalty goes up. Furthermore, it even establishes a more predictable revenue stream and the subscription data can be used to improve inventory forecasts. 

Having a reliable and flexible subscription order management module is essential for producing these results. And YANTRA Subscription can provide just that. YANTRA Subscription is a module that integrates with your existing order management system and lets you manage customer subscription orders to increase revenue and brand loyalty. 

Types of Subscription Orders 

There are different types of subscription orders that can be implemented depending on the services and products you provide to your customers. Below are some of the types that YANTRA Subscription supports. 

Absolute Replenishment Orders

  • Defined as “Product of the Month” type orders where each customer will receive the same item or items at the same time.

Relative Subscription Programs

  • Provides customers a series of products in a sequenced order. In this case, the customer will always get the first product in the series regardless of when they subscribed. 

Continuity Programs

  • Characterized as customer defined subscriptions. The customer has the option to create a subscription order for an individual product, or for all products in an order.

Key Benefits 

  • A single buying decision results in multiple orders 
  • Increase customer loyalty 
  • Additional consumer insights can be used to improve inventory forecasts 
  • Predictable and recurring revenue 
  • Implementation in as little as 4 weeks 

Key Functionality

  • Allow customers to choose the time interval between orders 
  • Provide the option for customers to delay an order or give a “don’t deliver before” date 
  • Allow customers to define “no change after date” where they cannot make changes to their order after this selected date 
  • Provide the customer the option to cancel the subscription 
  • Allow flexible subscription duration and expiration date options 
  • Ability to send notifications if customer’s payment method is expiring soon 
  • Can adjust the frequency of notifications
  • Provide the capability of configuring notifications
  • Can present a variety of payment plan options customers can choose from
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Streamline Your Reverse Logistics

Reverse Logistics has become essential in managing the e-commerce and spare parts businesses. With the appropriate processes, returned parts can easily be redirected to fulfill new customer demand. Improving these backend operations can provide significant competitive advantages to an organization.

Yantra Commerce can help you run your Reverse Logistics operations like a well-oiled machine. Our solution will model the entire end to end Reverse Logistics supply chain, not just the customer interfacing leg like other solutions. This key differentiator is pivotal for managing the effectiveness of the solution to monitor and improve the efficiency of handling and extracting value from returned items. Our solution even provides the option to automate end to end operations for even the most complex supply chains.

Some of the key features that provide Yantra Commerce its competitive edge includes: Return Orchestration, Install Base Management, Service Request Management, Vendor Collaboration, and Warranty Management. These key features are detailed below.

Return Orchestration

Return Order Lifecycle Management provides the ability to model even the most complex return processes. Whether it is as simple as crediting an item or more complex multiple stage process, Yantra Commerce can manage manual or fully automated processes, including providing updates throughout the return cycle. This allows for ease in validating complex business rules, aiding in related returns decision making, and maximizes value extraction.

Install Base Management

Yantra Commerce Install Base Management module supports tracking of both simple and composite SKUs. Return orders from customers and warranty agreements can be linked to the Install Base. Managing the Install Base is vital for maximizing the net worth of a customer and servicing them effectively.

Service Requests Management

When dealing with Spare Parts Management, these requests can consist of multiple legs for work orders, transfers, inbound and outbound shipments. These can be managed as a single service request from a customer but associated with multiple reverse logistics operations in the background. Yantra Commerce Service Request Management module allows for the association of multiple legs to service requests based on service types. These legs may have independent or interdepend statuses from either internal or 3rd party entities.

Warranty Management

Warranty of spare parts for return acceptance verification or servicing customers based on the warranty terms can be a tedious task. Reverse Logistics of parts are often however governed by the warranty contract with the customers. With Yantra Commerce, warranty conditions can be maintained for customers, install bases, individual parts, and part’s component and validated in real time during the management of the return or service requests from customers.

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Keeping Track of It All – Manage Assets, Inventory, and Events

Inventory management systems are needed more than ever to track, monitor, and manage assets in a variety of different industries. There is especially a rise in businesses that support rental of assets or conduct public and private events.

But finding an IMS to support additional needed features, like tracking asset allocations, monitoring task execution and performing functions via mobile devices is a rare find. Our Yantra IMS module, built from our leading warehouse management technology, does just that and more! 

Key Features

  • Track, monitor, and manage all assets 
  • Real time visibility into your inventory 
  • Seamless integration with existing systems
  • Generate operational and analytical reporting 
  • Supports mobile device interaction 
  • Delivers standard or custom processes across multiple sites or locations
  • Manage users, events, locations for all associated inventory 
  • Populate and optimize task executions for all users for different events
  • Accurately input, reserve, return, restock, and deduct inventory 
  • View, modify, and track work ticket creation and completion for assets
  • Receive proactive alerts for inventory expiration
  • Detailed dashboard to showcase tasks, events, and much more! 

Key Functionality

  • A micro-service of Yantra WMS which supports inventory related processes
  • Comprehensive control of movements within the warehouse to synchronize the movement of products and real time information
  • Inventory tracking is available at a granular level
  • Comprehensive inventory audit trail which provides information about the current and past inventory transactions
  • Complete management of transfer between warehouses
  • Locations provide information about capacity and items which are specifically dedicated to a location.
  • Ability to configure items, units of measure, master catalogs, categories, classifications, and additional item attributes
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Discover the Power of Intuitive Mobility

Today most of us are acclimated to holding substantial computing power in the palm of our hand. Warehousing is one element in the supply chain that utilizes smart technology to get the job done. Mobile warehouse solutions enable improved productivity, accuracy, and transparency in all aspects of their business.

Yantra Mobile, our handheld web based application is designed to increase your warehouse productivity by systematizing time-consuming processes and seamlessly capture data.

Key Features

User Intuitive
The screens are easy to navigate and user friendly
 
Responsive UI
It can support any screen resolution, from handheld devices to desktop terminals.
 
Auto Suggest Feature
Based on the key stroke entry in the item and LPN fields, the list of possible combinations is suggested for the user to choose
 
Field Level Validation 
For every data entry in the application, validations have been added and user friendly messages are being shown for the warehouse operator to act on
 
Flexible User Access 
Supports multiple warehouses from a single login allowing the capability of completing tasks in any number of warehouses
 
OS Independent
It is a web based application which can be used in any browser which supports HTML5 and CSS3
 
User Level Tracing
To debug any process in the warehouse, the trace can be enabled at the user device level which allows for a faster resolution and prevents performance issues
 
Extensible Framework
The application will allow extensibility and scalability to easily meet additional desired warehouse needs
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Make Your Warehouse Work For You

In today’s economy proficiency in receiving, stocking and shipping products is of paramount importance. Warehouse operators around the world are experiencing increased demand on supplying goods to market expecting speed from order placement to delivery. A modern microservice software based warehouse management system is need of the hour to accomplish real time synchronization of what’s occurring anywhere inside the facility and throughout the supply chain.

Yantra WMS, built on robust architecture with machine learning and AI capabilities provides end-to-end flexible fulfillment to help our customers manage their processes in the most optimized manner.

Key Features

  • Multi-Site Management
  • Events and Alert Management
  • Flexible task-based operations
  • Rapid Deployment Templates
  • Integration Management
  • Mobile Device Agnostic
  • Business and Process Health Monitoring
  • Self-healing capabilities
  • Detailed Dashboards/Reporting
  • Localization and Internationalization
  • Painless Upgrades
  • Proven Performance

YANTRA Commerce Console

    Introducing YC Console, is our intuitive desktop application which empowers the user with key information to take important decisions and enables them to act on it.
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How to Proactively Monitor and Resolve Your Supply Chain Challenges

In an ever-unpredictable world that is filled with challenges to adapt on the fly, supply chain organizations are realizing that understanding their underlying supply chain data and having the right insights into it is key. This coupled with being able to process the myriad of information across multiple channels while being able to self-heal and course correct on critical performance drivers helps organizations boost order fulfilment and customer service commitment both of which drive customer satisfaction.

YANTRA Control Tower, an intelligent observability and management platform, designed to deliver actionable real-time insights from large sets of data coming from a myriad of Enterprise Applications and technologies whether it may be an OMS/WMS systems like IBM Sterling OMS, YANTRA Commerce, Fluent Commerce, queuing mechanism like Kafka or IBM MQ, different databases like Oracle, MySQL, Postgres etc. and a lot more. Its ability to pull only incremental data, makes it lighter and faster, without putting any load on the data source.

YANTRA Control Tower provides key strategic insights to address the most important questions any organization has like reducing order cycle time, optimizing warehousing operations, improving demand forecasting and reducing inventory holding time, while ensuring optimum inventory availability for customer satisfaction.

YANTRA Control Tower helps businesses improve the end user experience drastically by analyzing transactional and business critical information, identifying bottlenecks and latency issues to quickly improve the response times, all with powerful dashboards that provide drill down capability. It keeps a track of the entire data and quickly responds by taking automated actions to fix issues without manual intervention and notifies the staff immediately to ensure the business does not get impacted and runs smoothly.

Key Benefits

  • Ability to collect and ship data from multiple data sources using light weight shippers
  • Displays near real-time data to take immediate actions
  • Works with various enterprise applications, optimized for Sterling OMS, Fluent Commerce and Yantra Commerce Suite of Applications like Yantra Connect, Yantra Console and Yantra Mobile
  • Supports rapid development of dashboards
  • Built using Elastic Stack for redundancy, scale, and easy deployment
  • Can be deployed on premise or on cloud

Key Features

Proactive monitoring of host systems, enterprise applications, infrastructure, network and business Workflows

  • Monitor availability of host, network device, API, DNS, FTP server
  • Check and verify that website specific endpoints are up and returning the correct text and status codes
  • Monitoring of infrastructure by hosts, Kubernetes pod or Docker containers etc
  • View current and historical values for metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, and network traffic for each component
  • Monitor network protocols like HTTP from hosts and containers
  • Understand how traffic is flowing through the network
  • Monitoring audit events from the Linux Audit Framework
  • Detect changes to critical files, like binaries and configuration files, identify potential security policy violations

Easy, customizable, and robust alerting solution

  • Automatically create and assign issues via different alerting mechanisms as and when an issue occurs in the application or the host machine
  • Integrates directly with JIRA, ServiceNow, Slack, Email and Teams to enable proactive alerting

Automation for enhancing supply chain process workflows

  • Inbuilt automation capabilities to resolve the issues in the application/host machines and enhance supply chain processes
  • No manual intervention required
  • Supports integration with RPA tools like UiPath etc

Reporting capabilities

  • Generation of Ad-hoc and scheduled reports
  • Allows customization based on filtering criteria
  • Allows scheduled report creation
  • Can be saved instantly as CSV

Inbuilt APM (Application Performance Monitoring) for observability and tracing

  • Collects detailed performance information of the application
  • Displays bottlenecks to zero in on problematic changes
  • Provides code level visibility by showing request flows in entire application
  • Supports distributed tracing using open telemetry

Provides strategic insights and business metrics for key processes within the enterprise applications