Nexmart
Bridging the Information Gap between Manufacturers and Retailers

When the repairperson fixes your wooden floorboards or metal substructures of your home, there is a very high likelihood they are using screws produced by HECO. Established back in 1888 as a familyrun business, today, HECO has grown into a behemoth organisation manufacturing close to 1.5 billion screws a year, which it sells to end consumers through a network of retailers. Although the company has always remained at the helm of innovation, there was one drawback that it was trying to overcome—inconsistent, non-refined, and isolated product information in their sales ecosystem. The varying taxonomies in the isolated sales and marketing systems made it difficult for its sales representatives to procure consistent information needed to conduct product presentations and consultations for HECO’s retailers. This not only hindered the sales reps from making convincing sales pitches to retailers but also made it difficult for retailers to sell the screws to end-users with accurate product information. What HECO wanted was to establish a digital, centrally-managed single source of truth—to enhance their sales and marketing outcomes, and also to ensure consistent and reliable product information at the retailer end where its products were being sold.

Interestingly, they found the perfect solution for their challenge with nexmart—a provider of digitalisation solutions for connecting manufacturers, retailers, and end-consumers. After implementing nexmart’s robust data integration tool, ‘sales App,’ HECO’s sales representatives immediately secured centralised access to 250,000 datasets from their product information management (PIM) systems, along with 1,000 product-related documents and over 90 films, presentations, and brochures—all in one place. “Sufficiently prepared and equipped with consistent product information at their fingertips, as well as all relevant customer data, such as bonus agreements, open item lists or sales figures, the sales representatives were able to significantly boost the quality of presentations and consultations given to the retailers,” says Udo von Meltzing, managing director of nexmart.

“Consequently, the immediate available information also enabled the sales personnel to visit at least one more customer per day.”

Not just the sales, the data integration capability of nexmart’s sales App facilitated greater collaboration across HECO’s marketing and product management departments.This, combined with a more seamless information flow from the manufacturer through to the retailers and their end consumers, significantly boosted HECO’s brand efficiency in the market.

This is but one of the instances where a nexmart’s offering has been able to boost a company’s sales-oriented outcomes. And notably, the sales App is just one tool of nexmart’s broad eBusiness portfolio. “Alongside sales App, our eBusiness portfolio includes multiple specialised solutions, each designed to connect, automate, and optimise all critical sales-oriented processes of clients through fast transfer of data between manufacturers, retailers, and end consumers,” mentions von Meltzing.

Another ‘jewel’ of the eBusiness portfolio is the ‘online Market.’ A unique collaboration platform, online Market, services as a hub where over 300 manufacturers and more than 10,000 retailers gather to foster long-term partnerships. Put simply, if a manufacturer is seeking a retail partner to sell their products, they have access to over 10,000 retailer accounts registered on the platform to collaborate with. If and when an agreement is reached between a manufacturer and their retail partner, the retailers are given access to the manufacturer’s entire product catalogue, from which they can pick the products they want to sell and place the orders using a shopping app styled checkout system. In addition, the retailers can also download product master data of their purchased products directly onto their ERP systems. Essentially, nexmart’s online Market reduces the complex ordering procedures in multi-distribution sales paradigm into a simple and seamless ‘online shopping’ like experience.

If the competencies of these eBusiness modules were not unique in itself, what further sets it apart is the modular integration model that the platform follows. For instance, clients seeking to streamline their sales operations can only opt for the sales App, while those seeking to simplify their ordering system can choose the online Market. “Whether it is sales App, online Market, or any other specialised solutions from our eBusiness portfolio, we have a flexible structure to make that happen with easy configurability,” mentions von Meltzing. Clients can even choose to integrate nexmart’s solutions with their existing systems. What’s more? After nexmart’s solutions have been implemented and connected with the client’s existing systems, any relevant data or information updated on one system will be automatically updated on all other systems connected via a nexmart solution—facilitating a synchronous and error-free data entry process.

Owing to such versatile functionalities offered by nexmart, its clients are breaking away from the chains of complex, traditional workflows and stepping on the digitalisation bandwagon. But, nexmart is barely getting started. The next step in its innovation path is the incorporation of advanced analytics capabilities into its portfolio, which will enable clients to gather business-critical insights and enhance their decisionmaking processes. Moving ahead with this undeterred momentum, nexmart is definitely poised to establish its position at the helm of the industry!