XERO Roadshow Singapore 2023

As the XERO app partner, the EMERGE team recently attended Xero Roadshow 2023 in Singapore as a valued warehouse management system partner.

It was pretty awesome as we got to meet many accountants, consultants & business outsourcing services that were interested in reselling for the EMERGE inventory management app. Being selected to exhibit shows the trust, accreditation, importance and support that XERO’s team put in us as a partner app to add value to their existing customers.

There were also partners in the payments, e-wallet, human resource management, and other workflow management apps for different industries that were exhibiting in XERO’s ecosystem. It is pretty great that they are willing to push their App-store that value adds their existing 3+ million users in getting a full and comprehensive software to move from Tier-1 ERP to Tier-2 ERP strategy. What is the difference between Tier-1 and Tier-2 ERP? We recently did an educational sharing session with XERO’s users and partners. We will share 3 out of the 6 ideas below, if you wish to learn about all 6 of them, please find the slides here: 6 trends of wholesale & trading companies post covid.

Tier-2 over Tier-1 ERP strategy

Tier-1 strategy is pretty much – last generation and also your company has to be considerably large to afford a full ERP implementation that sometimes could cost upwards of $50k. But in layman terms, it means deploying 1 single ERP for entire company on every aspects of the distribution or trading business

On the other hand, tier-2 strategy is for the 21st century, or should we say moving forward into the future. The trend will be going towards deploying multiple software for 1 company that are integrated together. These integrations can already be done by the different apps, such as EMERGE as workflow solution and XERO as accounting or they have open API where your technical team can integrate them together that works for your company.

The great Advantages of Tier 2 are as follows:

• Save cost and time – large scale implementation are done by traditional system integrators which offers their services at high fees
• Testing various off-the-shelf SaaS software will take little time compared to the full cycle Tier-1
• Many SaaS software offers minor customization at fraction of the cost
• Saving companies 90% on ERP implementation (actual case study)

Re-consider 3PL to your reduce warehouse size

Contrary to the understanding that 3PL increases cost drastically, I may beg to differ with many business owners leaning towards running their own fulfillment, but yes, this is very much on a business to business basis and should be studied carefully before making any decisions.

Cases to consider:

• If you’re selling to many territories (your base country or abroad), with high volume and your client’s require short lead times.
• Courier or forwarder fees together with large warehouse bills.
• If your products do not need to be assembled or worked-on (just repacking)

Again, it only works with great forecasting on your demand on individual territories. With moving to 3PL, you can reduce your current warehouse space and save. Furthermore, you can greatly focus your resources in sales & purchase rather than managing a team of fulfillment parties.

Just-in-time inventory

If you’re reading this, I am pretty sure you know what JIT is, so let me get to the chase. As corporate interest rates are rising, the ability to stay lean on inventory is increasingly important. To achieve this, or at least close to it, you need:

• Great understanding on the demand of goods on month on month basis throughout the year (eg: factory demands, seasonal products)
• Lead time from Ex-factory to your warehouse (or CIF) – make sure you know exactly how long each factory will take and give it some buffer
• Estimation of new customers that will be acquired that may increase demand over the coming months
• Document all your in’s and out’s with spreadsheet on a month on month basis for different products
• Use workflow management software like EMERGE because it helps you to track all these data and display reports to you that is actually useful

Integration between EMERGE & XERO

Currently, EMERGE is pretty tightly knitted with XERO as EMERGE will send Invoices, supplier invoices, payments & bills. The process will start from creating quotations, for sales reps who require to create quotations for their clients, then converting it to sales order for confirmed orders. EMERGE also allows you to reserve stocks using quotation in cases where you want to prevent other sales reps from selling the stocks away. Once sales have been issued, the available stock quantity of the product will be deducted from the inventory, but that does not mean your physical in-stock quantity will be reduced yet. Hence, only after you issue shipment and deliver it, it’ll deduct the physical in-stock quantity. With this, you can allow your driver (if you do have) to check addresses prior to delivery and make their route before heading out and clicking on delivery.

You can then combine multiple items from different sales orders into 1 single invoice or split items from 1 sales order into multiple invoice bringing flexibility into your order processing system. Thereafter, you can track all the payment status of the invoices on our intuitive listing page displayed in multi-currency as well. All these invoices and payments can now be pushed over to XERO for accounting processing in different currencies including cost of goods sold.

Key features in EMERGE

There are tons of features in EMERGE and it’s impossible to go through all of them individually, But we highlighted some key features that you might need to solve the issues in your wholesale & trading company.

• Multi-warehouse
• Serial number & batch management with expiry
• Warranty management
• Multi-currency
• Barcode printing & scanning for documents
• Trading workflow (no-stock buying/selling) with load management
• Advance user management & user access
• FIFO and landed product cost management
• B2B ecommerce app

XERO’s feature app

EMERGE is also selected as a featured app under inventory management software starting from December 2023 to January 2024 for 2 months. We hope that this will greatly bolster EMERGE as XERO inventory management app and build a stronger relationship between us.

EMERGE’s Vision

To summarize, we are one of the best, if not the best app for SMB wholesalers, distributors, traders, importers and exporters. Our vision in EMERGE is to make a dent in the global trade economy (yes it is cliche but that is what we aim for and we will do whatever it takes to achieve it).

Thanks for reading!