This week we're pleased to announce two new major milestones for 2010; Brightpearl version 3, and the launch of our new inventory/stock management system. We've been working hard over the past few months to bring you one of the most advanced inventory management systems available online, and of course it's 100% integrated with your accounting and ecommerce. Now you really have no excuse not to move off Sage or Quickbooks.

Brightpearl version 3 has been available to new users for a while now, featuring many improvements across the application including:

- Cleaner user interface on many of the commonly used screens
- Better batch processing of contact, product and order data fields
- Clickatell SMS integration
- Support for international users with US date format and multi tiered sales tax.
- 4 US time zones in addition to GMT (more due in 2011)

... but that's really only a small selection. See the full release notes. We'll be updating all users to version 3 over the next few weeks, aiming to have completed the update by the end of January 2011.

We'll be running a webinar on Wednesday 22nd December 1100 GMT to cover all the new stuff in this version, and cover some common workflows like creating and sending quotes, dealing with sales and also inventory management. Sign up for the webinar here. (If you're in the US or Canada then you'll never have used version 2, so there's no need to join).

If you're using inventory management and you're not yet on version 3, then make sure you read on...

The Brightpearl inventory system features:

- 3 levels of stock control : Basic, Standard and Premium to suit all types of product based business
- Powerful Purchase Order processing
- Full audit trail of stock movements
- FIFO (First In First Out) valuation
- Full automatic integration with your accounting ledgers
- Accurate cost-of-sales accounting
- "Allocation" of stock before shipment
- Multi warehouse support
- Aisle/Bay/Shelf/Bin location management within a warehouse
- Track inventory levels for each option of a product (eg size, colour)
- Easy filtering of sales and purchases
- "Drop ship" purchase ordering for items not in stock
- Part-shipment of Sales orders
- Easy back order processing
- Accurate handling of inventory and Purchase Orders both pro-forma and on credit terms.

For full details of which features are available on which pay plan, see here. For those of you interested in the technology, we've got a completely new data model behind the scenes that is robust and scalable. It's all been built on our new Service Oriented Architecture, which means that it's not long before you can access much of the functionality over API too. The new data model does mean that when you start using the new inventory system, we'll need to migrate all your old data.

We'll be upgrading all users over the next few weeks, aiming to have everyone running the new system by the end of January 2011. You'll be prompted automatically to upgrade when you log in to Brightpearl. You can postpone the upgrade until you've got a few minutes to spare.  If you're not using inventory management, none of this will affect you.

Full documentation for the inventory management is on our website, and it's definitely also worth having a play around with one of our demo systems:

http://www.hankselectrics.com/admin
Basic inventory; electrical retailer

http://www.solaristar.com/admin
Standard inventory; equipment wholesaler

http://www.indopacific.biz/admin
Premium inventory; clothing and sports equipment wholesaler

Want to get started now?

We already have a few hundred users on the new system; for those of you champing at the bit to switch over now, you can get started right away! You'll need to raise a support ticket asking to be upgraded and we'll bring all your data over for you. If you're running Brightpearl version 2, then please read this forum post - there may be some extra things to consider.

Here in the UK we're just coming out of a string of bank holidays; an opportunity for our tech team to get their heads down and add some great time-saving features to your system, as well as fix a stack of other issues. For the full list, have a look at our release notes. Here's a summary;

Allocation status

Stock allocation is a very handy feature in Brightpearl that lets you "earmark" stock for a customer before actually updating it. You can allocate only some rows on the sale, or all of them... but how do you know which sales are not yet done? Now it's easy - we've just introduced a way for you to filter your sales at the click of a mouse; to find sales that are not yet allocated, part allocated or fully allocated. Watch the video here.

Batch allocation

So say you've got a stack of sales on back order that can't ship because you don't have enough stock; a common scenario. When a Purchase Order arrives with a load of new stock, you need to allocate all this new inventory across your open sales, and then process those sales that are now fully allocated. We've introduced a new process that lets you auto-allocate inventory with one click! In conjunction with the allocation status, it's now easy to see which orders are good to ship. Watch the video here.

Extra product identifier fields for Google

You can now hold values for EAN (European Article Number), UPC (Universal Product Number) and ISBN (International Standard Book Number). As of June 20th Google will be changing the way it handles Google Base feeds so you should start populating these fields if you make use of it. If you would like to read more about these changes please refer to the following blog post by Google http://googlemerchantblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/enforcement-of-our-unique-identifier_03.html

Over the coming months we will be working on lots of exciting features involving product management, selling online and collecting sales from various web channels ... if you're interested in Google Base and want to know more http://blog.thisispearl.com/2010/01/09/how-to-sell-more-online-with-googlebase-and-pearl/ will reveal all!

You can now clone a purchase order to another; either from the same supplier or from a different supplier. Have a look in the "more" menu when you're in the Purchase Order.

Purchase orders and stock corrections

However hard you might try to keep inventory in check, there will always be the scenario where you need to correct mistakes. There are now two methods of correcting stock levels; the original method of adjustment, where items are still left as "received" on the original Purchase Order, and a new method to delete a goods-in entry which opens up the original Purchase Order for you to re-receive the stock (or else delete the purchase order if you really need to!). However if you've sold or allocated any of the items on the Purchase Order then you can't delete the goods-in. For full details on stock corrections, read our documentation here.

"Fixed rate shipping" has been discontinued; in favour of support for distance-selling and international ecommerce. The system now follows the clear rule whereby the shipping tax rate adopts the tax rate of the most-used tax rate in the cart.

You can now batch update date custom fields from the contact and order listing screens. We've put together a video that walks you through custom fields on sales; the same principle applies for purchases, customers and suppliers. Watch the video.

Yet again, Magento comes out top in a recent survey of ecommerce platforms. The report produced by Tom Robertshaw looks at 33,632 ecommerce sites in the Alexa Top 1 Million sites to see which software the store uses. 40 different systems are ranked, with Magento coming out as the clear leader with 20% of the surveyed market. 

Grow your business with Magento
Magento has recently launched Magento "Go" - which is a hosted/cloud version of the system that lets you get up and running in minutes with no technical expertise needed. This is really interesting because it means that, with the same provider, you can go from 100 SKUs on a low-committment solution all the way up to an international, enterprise product. Don't underestimate the cost of changing ecommerce system when you outgrow your current platform! The Magento product sat between the two extremes is Magento Community Edition (often called MCE) - a free open-source PHP download that you install on your own server. If you don't have the technical knowledge for this, the team here at Brightpearl can give you a hand (email magento@brightpearl.com).

The ageing dinosaurs; osCommerce and Zen Cart
What's also interesting to see is the very large number of stores on osCommerce and Zen Cart. osCommerce and Zen Cart are both, like Magento, an open source PHP download. In fact Zen Cart is actually a branch of osCommerce with a number of community add-ons bundled in, along with some other core changes... but osCommerce is now over TEN years old! Credit where credit's due - osCommerce has really transformed the world of low-cost easy-access ecommerce - but I'm intrigued as to what the future holds for the 21.5% of stores running on this old software. Fortunately there's a huge community of developers and designers behind both platforms so there's no rush to be going anywhere yet.

But what about back-office?
Over the past few years it's become clear that all solutions are focussed primarily on the front-end; delivering quality content to the customer and generating the sale, not the back-end; order processing, accounting and post-sale customer service. But hey, that makes sense. You don't call yourself an ecommerce platform for nothing! Even though Magento is the clear leader when it comes to front-end product listing and shopping cart software, the back office processing still leaves a lot to be desired. There are a number of extensions on the market that interface your Magento store to an ERP system, but nothing works really well for the small business owner that wants everything online. That's where we come in ...

Brightpearl and Magento
Magento's incredible growth curve is one of the reasons we chose them as the first of our 3rd party ecommerce connectors. We want to provide small and medium sized businesses with the best end-to-end solution for multichannel retail, so partnering with the strongest platform in the industry was a logical choice. Magento is also a mature, powerful ecommerce system that shares much of the same data structure as Brightpearl - an important consideration when integrating the two. One the surface you might think that all ecommerce systems share the same entities, but that's not the case. Shopify, for example, does not have a hierarchical category structure; instead they have "collections".

What's also really important when building an integration between an ecommerce store and an ERP system like Brightpearl is considering how product variations are handled, and the way that inventory across those variations is managed. If you're tracking inventory of tee shirts, for example, then you really do need to know how many red ones you have and how many blue ones you have, rather than how many tee-shirts you have overall. BigCommerce struggles to do this well; Magento on the other hand is designed to enforce unique, per-variant SKUs and an excellent structure for stock control.

The Brightpearl-Magento integration handles everything from inventory across variants to tax and accounting - a powerful integration that really does deliver great results. Our original proposition here at Brightpearl was "one system" - which is why we launched our own ecommerce platform in the first place! The addition of support for Magento is something that we've put a lot of effort into however, and we strongly believe that the "one system" mantra is still valid. You can manage pretty much all your day-to-day processes in Brightpearl, and Magento obediently follows along. It's only when you want to work with ecommerce-specific data (like product images) that you need to log into Magento.

In a future blog, I'll be talking about the principles of multichannel data management - and about why it's important to manage your products and inventory OUTSIDE of your ecommerce software - to get this delivered right into your inbox, just sign up for email delivery (link on the right hand side!).

Chris
Head of Product

This blog is part of the series of posts that talk about the April release of Brightpearl. There's a lot to cover, so I'm breaking it down into seven separate posts spread over a week. If you're not yet subscribed to our blog by email, now is the time! You'll get each post delivered directly to your inbox. Just click the link on the right ...

This is the third in the series of seven blogs about the April release. This release is being rolled out throughout this week; expect to see it on your account soon! Today, let’s have a quick look at the new process for handling purchase order corrections.

So you place a purchase order with a supplier, send it off and a few days later a few boxes arrive. Normally the supplier is accurate and they send what you ask for, but today you’re in a rush and don’t have time to open each carton to check against the delivery note. You head along to the goods-in screen in Brightpearl to receive the goods and then get on with the day. However, later on you realise that you were only sent 9 of the 10 you ordered. You’ve been scammed! Or maybe the supplier just made a mistake - but either way you need to update Brightpearl.

We’ve made it easier to work with corrections - just go to the purchase order screen and click the quantity received; this will take you to the goods-in report for that purchase order where you can amend the numbers. And of course since Brightpearl is also your accounting system, the bookkeeping is done automatically for you. Simple!

You can see in the screenshot above I’ve also highlighted a couple of other things relevant to purchase orders; the “stock status” icon - the one that looks like a Lego brick - tells you whether all inventory items on the purchase order have been received (green), some items have been received (blue) or none at all (white). Most usefully, you can filter the purchase order list by this; click Purchases::By stock status.

The other thing that's worth mentioning is the fact that the nominal code has been disabled; this is to ensure that your accounting transactions are correct. You can enable these rows if you want to however; we have full documentation on accounting for Purchase Orders or watch a short video.

That’s all for today - tomorrow we’re going to look at inventory locations and the different ways to manage them in Brightpearl.

In this blog, the fourth in a series of seven about the April release (full release notes here), we’re going to have a good look at the way Brightpearl handles inventory locations within each warehouse. Locations such as Aisle, Bay, Shelf, Bin - or even as simple as “upstairs” and “downstairs”. If you'd like to use location management and aren't yet doing so, I suggest you have a look at our documentation.

First of all, some background. There are three levels of location management; you choose which you want to use at Setup::Products/Inventory.

1. No location tracking
Does what it says on the tin! You can still have multiple warehouses, but there’s no location management within each warehouse. 

2. Standard
This is by far and away the most popular method of tracking inventory location. Each item is given one location within each warehouse. Every delivery of that item is assigned to that location. If you want to move items around within the warehouse, all current inventory of that item is moved; this is the “product default location” and you set it on the product edit screen. You can have a different location for each warehouse; so for example in Warehouse A an item would live in A.02.4.A and in Warehouse B, you'd have it in UPPER.B.4

3. Multi-concurrent
This is where it gets more complicated. Every time you receive goods into the warehouse, you choose which location that consignment is added to. It means that a single product line can actually be spread about within your warehouse. This option makes location management a fair bit more time consuming, but once you have it dialled you can make more use of limited warehouse space. As this method requires extra steps with everything you do with inventory, I'd suggest you give our sales or support team a call before deciding to embark on this level of inventory management.

One of the new features this release is “inventory consolidation” - which is relevant only if you’re on the standard location management setting. Previously, if you changed a product default location and then received more goods, the database actually contained items in both the old location (from previous deliveries) and the new location. This sometimes prevented stock corrections where the system didn’t think you had enough on-hand stock in the selected location. Now, when you change the default location of a product, ALL inventory is moved to that location, so for each item you’ll only ever have stock in one place (per warehouse).

Also in this screenshot above, you can see the address formatting (all caps, set this at Setup::Company::Other options), and also a barcode for the goods-note ID; just add "_gnBarcode_" to the template. You'll then be able to scan this into the warehouse manager interface to bring up the goods note immediately - more about that in next week's blog!

Where do locations show?

• The inventory detail report shows you exactly what you have and where it lives in the warehouse - and you can filter to just show inventory in a certain location too; handy for detailed stock counting. As you allocate stock or greate goods-out notes, the inventory is allocated from locations based on First-In-First-Out (FIFO). 
• When you print a consolidated picking list (select a few lines from the goods-note report and click "pick"), items from all goods notes will be shown on a single report, ordered alphabetically by location so that you can work around the warehouse in an efficient fashion.
• Individual goods-out notes can be set up to show the item location (which may be multiple locations for a single item if you're on multi-concurrent inventory management). If you want to show the item location on your goods-out notes, make sure you turn on the feature at Setup::Products/Inventory.
• If you filter the product list by warehouse (a new feature this release) then you'll also see the product's default location for that warehouse; exporting this screen to Excel is a great place to get data for a stock take.

That's a quick overview of location tracking - for full details pop along to our support pages. For information about all the other new stuff in the April release, make sure you have a good read through our release notes.

OK, we're back! After a couple of days heads down working with the development team on some awesome upcoming features, I'm resuming the series of blog posts about April's release. There's a lot of awesome stuff to cover, which is why I'm breaking it down into a few chunks. If you missed the previous posts, have a look at Inventory locations, Purchase order corrections and Inventory transfers. This post covers custom fields (recently added to the product listing) and sales reporting.

Let's take a look at custom fields first. Custom fields have been available in Brightpearl ever since the beginning; this release heralds a number of usability improvements as well as the introduction of custom field filters on the product listing (as you can see in the screen shot below). Brightpearl is already packed with more standard fields than you can shake a stick at - but there's always going to be something else that you want to store! There are a number of different types of custom field supported; Select list, Date, Text, Textarea, Yes/no and Numeric. You can add custom fields to the following:

• Customers
• Suppliers
• Products
• Sales orders
• Purchase orders

... as you can imagine the possible uses are endless! You can add custom fields to your document templates (sales, quotes, invoices, goods-out notes and purchase orders) using the PCF code, which lets you share the information with customers, contractors and suppliers. Recently we also introduced the ability to add product custom fields as columns on your order templates - read more about templates here.

If you find yourself regularly applying filters to a list of products, sales or customers you can add the filter to your favourites by clicking the link at the bottom left of the screen. Handy!

So, changing tack completely, let's take a look at another improvement to reporting that we've just introduced; "top products for a customer". A few weeks ago we upgraded many of the sales reports; adding more filters, columns and also made them faster. Find them all under the Reports :: Sales menu. From here you can see your top products, your top customers, most productive sales channel, most lucrative lead source, best-selling brands and many combinations of variables too. Powerful stuff - in fact I'll be going into more detail on the sales reporting in another blog post soon. In case you hadn't spotted it (I wouldn't blame you, it's pretty hidden) - here's how to see your top selling products for a certain customer. From the "mini tabs" (see the screen shot below), click "Sales by product" in the orders tab. Dead useful if you're preparing to make a visit to a client to sell the latest season's goods, negotiating new terms, deciding what to buy for next season (perhaps they are an international distributor of yours) ... the list goes on.

That's it for today; watch out for the final couple of blog posts about the April release coming in the next few days; Warehouse management and barcodes, and Running your stock take. If you've not yet signed up for email delivery of the blog - just click the link on the right and you'll get them straight to your inbox!

When Marc Andreessen says something, I like to pay close attention.

This is the man who wrote the first widely-used web browser-- Mosaic, later re-developed as Netscape Navigator, and still thriving in its latest incarnation as Mozilla Firefox. That makes Marc, along with Tim Berners-Lee -- the man who designed HTML and the hypertext transfer protocol-- effectively the co-inventor of the World Wide Web. And the company he founded in 1994 around that browser, Netscape Communications, was the first to really challenge Microsoft’s effective monopoly on the PC and therefore on our digital lives. He was the first to paint a bold vision of the Web itself as the new operating system for our PCs-- open, free, dynamic. And now, as one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors, he’s out placing some of the smartest bets on the products and services that will define our future. So he is something of a guru for me. An across-the-Web guru whom I’ve never met in person, but still.

So when he says something like “I think 2012 is the year that retail--retail stores--really starts to feel the pressure”, as he did late last year-- I get worried. In fact, all of us who are fighting in the small retailer’s corner should get worried.

If you take a deeper look at why he feels that way it’s for one overriding reason-- the heavy cost of carrying and managing inventory:

“... the economic pressure is huge as e-commerce gets more and more viable ... It's going to get harder and harder to justify the retail store model.

The model has this fundamental problem where every store has to have its own inventory and every store is also a warehouse. The economic deadweight of that entire inventory in each store--that's what took down Borders. [the US book chain that filed for bankruptcy in 2011]”

And he’s right-- the costs of inventory, especially mismanaged inventory can be lethal for any business, but especially for retail. And it’s easy to mismanage inventory-- see our upcoming blog post: “How I turned the worst year in our history into the best by careful inventory planning.”

So if the risks of carrying inventory can be so deadly what is an ambitious retail business to do? What can you do to avoid being made a victim of the growth of online, inventory-light supersites?

Well, as you might expect for a company that makes (among other things) inventory management software, we have a few thoughts on the subject here at Brightpearl.

1)Try not to carry *any* inventory. It’s not too strong (nor is it too paradoxical) to say that despite making inventory management software, we hate inventory. In fact, we’re big fans of the super-lean, just-in-time approach to inventory management pioneered by Japanese manufacturers and taken up now by every major manufacturer in the world. And some incredibly successful retailers as well (see: WalMart). After all, inventory on its own serves no benefit in a business: it ties up capital, depreciates in value very quickly, takes up physical space and (if you’re not particularly tidy) gets in the way of the rest of your business. Never take for granted that your business needs to carry inventory. Always question what you can do to eliminate it almost entirely. Think sleek, almost empty space. Think drop-shipping directly from your suppliers to your customers without products having to touch your store, warehouse or even your payables.

2)So if you must carry inventory, be very clear on why you do. I can only think of 4 half-decent reasons:

a) To allow customers to see and experience the product. Allowing prospects to try before they buy is a noble (and occasionally necessary) reason to carry some inventory but if they’re trying your expensive-to-carry inventory and then buying someone else’s super-low online price, you’re sort of hosed. If you’re going to carry the inventory, you might want to be actively thinking of ways to make sure that when they do buy, they do it from you. Making sure your suppliers provide you with prices that allow you to match the best available online is a start. And as we mention below and discuss in more detail in an upcoming post, if you do it right your physical store becomes a killer advantage over online-only merchants.

b) To offer instant gratification. Again, an important reason but one that I think gets accepted too easily without being tested very hard. Just how much business would you lose if you carried fewer items? You really need to know the answer to this question for each of the product lines and SKUs you carry. If you’re interested in some ideas we have on how to determine the optimal amount of “impulse buy” inventory to keep on hand, let us know in the comments section and we’ll publish more in an upcoming post.

c) To avoid supply chain risk. Sadly, many retailers are forced to carry inventory for hot products that might sell out from the manufacturer or for which the manufacturer is unreliable. If the former, we suggest finding ways to ‘pool’ inventory of those products from fellow retailers who are not your direct competitors. For the latter, we suggest finding a different product or vendor as soon as you can. Holding inventory to avoid supply chain risk is a dangerous thing. The inventory had better be pretty unique for you to take this risk with your business.

d) To decorate your store. This is the weakest reason of all, but many businesses carry inventory just to make for nice shelf and window displays or to make their store look full. As one store owner put it to me, “I’d love to make do with fewer bottles of perfume on display but then the store starts to look so empty.” It does have some merit in fashion and design-driven industries, but you should be able to take a page from the antique stores everywhere and re-use the inventory you carry for reasons ‘a’ through ‘c’ and to decorate your store.

3) For what inventory you do carry, know exactly what you have, how long you’ve had it, and where it is. Because it ages, because it ties up your capital, and because it has a tendency to go walking off in the hands of anyone who doesn’t have your best interests at heart, taking your embedded costs and potential margin with it-- you need to keep a close eye on it. Inventory management systems are the best way to do this. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s companies that have the most software to manage their inventory that tend to have the least of actual inventory around, clogging up their balance sheets.

4) And finally, my favorite: go multi-channel. Make your inventory available through every channel your customers buy through: not just your store, but also your website, other peoples’ websites, eBay, Amazon, wherever you can. Because the more sales channels you have, the greater likelihood you have of selling through your inventory and the fewer days of sales you are likely to have on hand. We have a few thoughts on where you might find software systems that can help you do this well.

As a final thought, we’ll leave you with the following chart. It shows the inventory carried by all US retailers between 1992 and 2009. Notice the steep decline over time as companies become more efficient at carrying less inventory (represented in number of days worth of sales on hand). Where is your business on this measure of efficiency? Don’t know? We think you should find out. We can help.

Keeping accurate inventory levels is important. We all know that. But still, it’s all too common to see a business struggling to grow because they are spending too much time trying to get a handle on their stock levels, struggling to communicate stock levels to their customers or sales channels, and struggling to place and receive purchase orders in a timely fashion. Something’s not right.

Whatever software you use, accurate inventory relies on accurate and timely data management. Everyone in your team needs to believe in the importance of accurate inventory.

The need to have strict inventory management processes as well as software was raised yet again, when recently I was chatting with a guy that runs a number of retail stores in the local region. We were talking about the different systems he runs in each store. In one store, he has an up to date Point Of Sale system, fully integrated with his suppliers, connected to a central server, barcode support... the whole shebang. In the other he has a old DOS based program running on an archaic old PC under the till. Which store do you think has the most up to date stock levels?

It's the second one. The one with the old DOS system. Having a decent system is only part way to having accurate inventory... the staff that are running the shop on the flashy modern POS software have made a pigs-ear of the stock levels, whereas those on the old DOS kit are doing just fine.

One reason is the mental attitude of the team. Everyone needs to understand that keeping inventory up to date is one of the most important things you can do as a retail or wholesale business. Regardless of the system you run, you need to have processes that you and your team will stick to.

In fact there’s one Brightpearl user that’s recently gone live that has deemed it a sackable offence to pick an item from a location that is not the one on the packing note. Harsh, maybe, but it goes to show how much it matters to keep inventory in check.

To help you and your team understand why inventory management is so important, we’ve put together a whitepaper that goes into more detail. Grab a coffee, close your office door and have a read!

Download whitepaper here