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Aptos Engage: What Everyone's Still Talking about 1 Month Later, Part 1


Almost 350 executives from all walks of retail gathered at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas May 2-5 for Aptos Engage 2016, our first annual client conference. The three-day event featured over 150 hours of content, dozens of networking opportunities and countless conversations centered on delivering seamless experiences to shoppers no matter when, where or how they shop.

As we look back at Engage – and hear from customers, partners and others who attended – we compiled the Top 10 takeaways. We've served up the first five highlights below, and will wrap-up Engage takeaways on our blog next week.

 

 Aptos Engage 2016: Takeaways #1-5

#1: Order Management is Now a Mission Critical Process

Aptos recently sponsored two research studies to dig deeper into the challenges and opportunities associated with omni-channel enterprise order management. The first study, conducted by Edgell Knowledge Network, discovered that retailers spend on average a shockingly high eighteen cents of every online dollar getting orders into the hands of shoppers. The second study, conducted by Retail Systems Research, established a direct relationship between effective order management processes and winning performance:

When you analyze the results of these two studies, the research is as impressive as it was conclusive: those who manage the high costs of order lifecycle management are those who are winning. This topic came up repeatedly throughout Engage. Several customers shared their success stories with Aptos Enterprise Order Management, and many others discussed their planned OMS investments for the coming months.

 

#2. Meeting Customer Fulfillment Expectations Requires Every Inventory Asset

We operate in a "Buy Anywhere, Fulfill Anywhere, Return Anywhere" world, and shoppers have zero tolerance for stockouts and long lead times. Keeping customers coming back is a never-ending process that requires the ability to leverage every inventory asset in the retail ecosystem. As discussed at Engage, the latest releases of Aptos Merchandising and Aptos Enterprise Order Management deliver new tools to expand inventory visibility beyond the four walls to empower retailers to save every sale by fulfilling orders from vendor inventory, future inventory, and streamlining the returns process by supporting direct to warehouse returns. Together, these powerful new tools deliver a truly singular view of inventory.

Click here to learn how True Religion leverages enterprise-wide inventory to bring Endless Aisle to its shoppers.

 

3#. It Just Got a Whole Lot Easier to Get Size Right

Aligning sizes to local demand has challenged retailers for the better part of a century. At Engage, Aptos Product Director Nick Leeper introduced two new Analytic Applications that are designed to help get size right:

The Size Curve application leverages comprehensive new size analytics - based on local customer demand - to optimize the product mix for local stores, while the Size Pack Recommender helps to optimize sizes by store by automating the creation of optimal pack configurations by product mix, and solidifying a repeatable, scalable pre-pack process.

To learn more, download our latest Size Analytics eBook: The Perfect Fit.

 

#4. Store Managers Now Have the Tools to Make Smarter Decisions

Analytics Product Manager Cheryl Cochran led a customer panel discussing how they were "taking analytics to the streets" by empowering their field teams, including Store Managers, District Managers and Regional Managers. New mobile analytics tools delivered as part of Aptos Enterprise Analytics deliver data and context to help each decision maker, at every level, better evaluate their performance and identify both threats and opportunities. These new tools include:

Comp Performance by Department

Store Performance Rankings vs District/Region/Chain

Top 10 Products and Region/Chain Rankings

 

#5. Aptos Support Can Help with Much More than Maintenance

Anytime I hear a product or service described as a "well-kept secret" I cringe, because it means that we in Marketing have not done a good job of getting the word out. During Engage, we started getting the word out about the complete menu of services offered by our talented and deeply experienced Support team. Our seasoned support professionals can help clients with much more than day-to-day maintenance programs, including Direct to Store Support and Hardware Support. They are also able to offer preventative maintenance programs as well as dedicated support resources and end-user training programs to help free up clients' internal IT departments so they can focus on more strategic initiatives.

 

Did you attend Aptos Engage 2016? If so, what were your takeaways? Leave a comment below and let us know.

If you didn't get a chance to attend, stay tuned for next week's post recapping five more takeaways. We hope you can join us next year for Aptos Engage 2017, May 1-4 in Hollywood, FL. To register, click here.