Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: Luxury British lighting brand, Bert Frank, have switched on Brightpearl to streamline post-purchase operations and end manual processes. SAP has launched SAP Product Footprint Management, a solution that enables companies to calculate the carbon footprints for their products. Alibaba Group subsidiary has delivered over one million shipment orders in September 2021. insightIQ is a new platform that gives brands a better understanding of their advertising performance. Terminus acquires Zylotech, launches Terminus Customer Data Platform (CDP) to improve the accuracy of B2B go-to-market data.
Brightpearl lights up future for Bert Frank in just 75 days
Luxury British lighting brand, Bert Frank, have switched on Brightpearl to streamline post-purchase operations and end manual processes. After a 75 day implementation, Bert Frank now has access to the scalable retail operations platform. It integrates ‘out of the box’ with its eCommerce platform to provide a central source of truth to drive growth. With unrivalled automation functionality at their fingertips, the team behind Bert Frank can look forward to a simpler, more streamlined way of doing business. One that saves time, eliminates mistakes and offers a better customer experience.
Founded in 2013, Bert Frank creates modern designer lighting that’s made exclusively in the UK. The range includes brass, alabaster and bone china lights, customers with an eye for interiors snap up in their thousands. Consumers can buy via a Farringdon Road showroom in London and a successful Shopify-powered website.
The small team running the business was stretched to the limit with managing orders, customers and data across endless spreadsheets. They urgently needed a slicker, built-for-retail operations system that could better support rapid growth. The platform has a game-changing retail features, including a Demand Planner and Automation Engine, Brightpearl was the obvious choice.
With Brightpearl up and running, Bert Frank is able to automate many of its previously time-consuming manual processes. This included fulfilling and shipping orders. The team has gained real-time insight into its order management, financials and inventory. It means they can finally stop spending the majority of their time on day-to-day operations. As a result start focusing on the business’ growth and long-term goals.
SAP Launches SAP Product Footprint Management
SAP has launched SAP Product Footprint Management, a solution that enables companies to calculate the carbon footprints for their products. This is managed through their entire product life cycle using SAP Product Footprint Management. The latest in SAP’s expanding portfolio of sustainability solutions.
The solution enables companies to lower carbon emissions, make products more sustainable, and disclose their products’ environmental footprints to regulators. The launch underpins SAP’s sustainability strategy to deliver products and services that address the sustainability challenges and opportunities of customers.
SAP Carbon Footprint Solution helps companies redesign for sustainability. SAP has been leading by example in sustainable business practices for more than a decade. The company was named software industry leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for 14 consecutive years. SAP’s membership in the Value Balancing Alliance and use of the annual SAP Integrated Report illustrates its commitment to integrating economic, environmental, and social performance to drive business decisions.
Alibaba’s self-driving robots deliver over one million orders
Alibaba DAMO Academy, the global research initiative set up by Alibaba Group says the last-mile logistics vehicle has delivered over one million shipment orders as of September 2021. “Xiaomanlv” was developed by its autonomous driving lab (“lab”) and achieved this milestone within one year of its launch. It serves more than 160 urban communities and school campuses across 52 cities in mainland China. Collectively, they have delivered packages to more than 200,000 consumers.
The lab also announced plans to increase the fleet of Xiaomanlv to 10,000 over the coming three years. This will boost delivery capacity to one million packages per day.
Alibaba has been exploring autonomous driving technology since 2015 to address the last-mile delivery challenges associated with the eCommerce economy. By leveraging its cloud-based intelligent simulation testing platform, which is able to create up to 10,000 virtual scenarios, This included extreme weather and ultra-weak night visibility scenarios – for testing the robot’s algorithm. Xiaomanlv can manage without human intervention 99.9999% of the time. Despite the challenge that it needs to identify over 40 million obstacles during a typical day’s work.
Currently there are over 200 Xiaomanlv operating in 22 provinces in China. Alibaba plans to deploy a total of 1,000 vehicles by March next year. Each robot can deliver around 50 packages at a time and as many as 500 boxes per day. It covers 100 kilometres on a single charge.
The lab has been working with Cainiao, the logistics arm of Alibaba Group, on driverless delivery trucks. To enable autonomous deliveries in faster speed scenarios and over longer distances. It expects the trucks to be running on public roads in various cities within three years. The lab is also developing other products equipped with autonomous driving capabilities. This includes inspection robots in electricity power plants, which are expected to be put into use in the near future.
Bluewater Media launches advanced visualisation platform
Bluewater, a direct-to-consumer marketing and advertising agency launched insightIQ. The solution is a visualisation platform that helps brands develop a crystal clear picture of media performance data and business growth. Bluewater provides fully converged services including production and creative, media planning and buying, commerce and sales support with analytics.
The new solution is a key addition to Bluewater’s IQsuite, a collection of customised tools for marketing performance. insightIQ brings together more than 20 marketing, media, eCommerce and martech platforms into one place. It gives advertisers an opportunity to see how their advertising strategy is driving their business forward.
Powered by custom cloud infrastructure, this new platform was designed from the ground up to provide clear, actionable information. Custom visuals and interactivity provide both seasoned marketers and non-marketing leaders the ability to intrusively understand advertising performance. insightIQ supports any type of goal including direct sales, retail sales, lead gen and awareness/audience. The platform can be customised to work with any type of funnel or to support proprietary brand metrics and goals.
Terminus acquires Zylotech, launches Terminus Customer Data Platform (CDP)
ABM vendor Terminus has acquired Zylotech and launched Terminus Customer Data Platform (CDP) to improve the accuracy of B2B go-to-market data. Terminus is an account-based engagement platform built to deliver more pipeline and revenue through multi-channel account-based marketing (ABM).
With the acquisition of Zylotech, Terminus has an ABM platform with a standalone CDP purpose-built for B2B. Terminus CDP enables customers to continuously cleanse go-to-market data and automatically discover new buying committees at their target accounts. Zylotech is the leading B2B customer data platform, serving enterprise brands including Google, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco and Rimini Street.
Data usage and spending is exploding but only 12% of B2B marketers have confidence in their data. B2B CRM data is painfully inaccurate and incomplete, and manual efforts to clean, deduplicate and activate are slow and expensive. This leads to poor conversion rates, an incomplete view of buying committees, and misleading ROI.
The Terminus CDP solves all these problems, with a complete suite of solutions including audit, cleanse, enrich, and data management backed by the industry’s largest global network of decision-makers and Buying Committees. With Terminus CDP, go-to-market teams will dramatically improve data accuracy, campaign effectiveness, and reduce wasted sales cycles. All driven by our always-on, 1st-party sourced network of decision-makers and buying committees.
