We parse the order, go up and ask the API, “Okay, this is in Canadian dollars. What's the exchange rate right now? Change it to US dollars. Update the order before placing the order into the ERP.” So the accounting team and everybody in the U.S. that's fulfilling the order don't have to deal with the multiple currencies. That could be another simple one.
That one happens quite often, international orders and things like that. The order may be placed here, but the targeted shipping address is in France. So now all of a sudden we have to start doing things like that: taxes, intermodal, shipping, different things like that. When it comes to the orders, the most important thing is to ask, “What is the panacea, right? What is utopia for you? What could you possibly automate?”
Most of my clients are like, “Oh, we just want to do it real easy. We just need this.” And I'm like, “Yeah, but what do you want? Tell me what you want. Because probably 90% of what you want, we have out of the box, because we literally do this day in and day out.”
So my best piece of information is, sit down and dream big when creating a group shopping platform. Write every single thing down that you can possibly want. Then, when you go shopping for a platform, if one vendor says, “Oh my gosh, that's pie in the sky, I can give you about 10% of that,” you might find another vendor that says, Yeah, 90% of that's out of the box, the last 10%, the last mile we can do. But it might only cost a couple grand to automate that.” You're like,” I can really have everything I want.” You never know if you don't ask.
Again, back to what we said. If you don't know what you don't know, maybe you sit down and ask them, “What would you do? What have you seen others like us do? What do you think are best practices, and spend a significant amount of time during your upfront discovery to really mock up a lot of these different scenarios?” The fact of the matter is, most of it's available to you. You just don't know that it's available to you. So Chris, go ahead and dive into anything you want regarding the order system here.
CHRIS: There's so much here that we can also dig into around governance within the system. Because whenever you're working with more than one party in the system, especially with shipping and fulfillment, inventory and lead time, even the pricing upfront with the group ordering process, these can be really challenging experiences for different members because they actually need the items. It's great that they're getting a discount, that's awesome. But they need them by a certain date or else it's a problem. And so there are a couple of things here that we want to be careful about.
This is going into integrating with notifications and messaging and tying back all of this data that we're pulling in into workflows. But ultimately, whenever there is a group purchase, we may need a certain number of orders before we can actually execute on placing the order, with the possibly the manufacturer and distributor or being able to fill a container or some truckload, etc. So that's the first thing.
What is the governance there? To be specific, with this group order, everyone needs to place their orders by this date and time and then they receive notifications if they've expressed interest in participating and they haven't participated yet. And then maybe there's even a model where we rate how high of an integrity there is around people saying they're going to participate and then they don't. And so being able to have some basic sophistication around this governance so that we're engaging folks and notifying them and giving them clear expectations.
And that's something that you'll hear throughout our talks, expectation management with the end-customer. This is going to go so far to make their self-service experience a really positive one.
In addition to the pieces there, then you also have, “Okay, the order is placed, the fulfillment is underway, what's the status?” This is where integrations can truly be night and day, because some businesses, they're going to be able to adapt and make fine-tuning adjustments if they just know what's going on, they just need to know. And the credibility of your buyers group as a whole is on the line whenever we're operating the software. And the members need to know if something is on its way and it's delayed, then they can make some changes.
So be able to reflect the status of where the order is and where the shipment is in its route. And this is really important for the different vendors that you're working with as well, that you're able to integrate with them seamlessly too, so that they get a notification that, “Hey, there's an order.” Maybe they didn't find out about the order because the integration wasn't very good, and this caused a bunch of delays.
These are all high-level concepts that just speak to what you just you just hit on.