Why Booksolve Connect

Think of the supply chain headaches in business. What absorbs time and effort for little or no business benefit? What processes could be automated if organisations had the technical, operational or financial wherewithal to tackle them?

Making books discoverable is a challenge. Even with physical products, the Internet represents the biggest and most extensive shop window for books, with none of the constraints on physical shelf space. However, if you can’t physically hold a book, weigh it in your hand, glance through it or read an excerpt, then the sense of touch has to be compensated for visually (think jacket images, look inside widgets and additional text). This requires far more metadata than just author, title and ISBN to properly describe the product. The challenge is not only one of giving the potential purchaser enough information to imagine holding the book in their hand, but to present that information in a consumer-friendly way, get that information to all the relevant outlets in as accurate and timely a manner as possible, and then confirm the price and availability of the product too. On top of that, the format and content need to comply with the individual retailer or e-tailer’s business needs.

Having made the book discoverable, both suppliers and retailers will have their own criteria for sourcing and fulfilling orders, as well as the management of the transactions that go with the order. Whilst product enquiries and orders for mainstream titles will usually be sent directly to the publisher or main source of supply (distributor), specialist or hard to source titles may be sent to a preferred wholesaler. How do you know what to send where? How do you keep track?

The ability to send price and availability (P&A) enquiries and receive responses in near real time means the status of a product can be confirmed ahead of ordering, minimising the number of unfulfilled orders, increasing open to buy budgets and reducing the number of dues to be housekept. For special orders, it is a prerequisite. Customers want to know how much a book will cost and when they will receive it. The only practical way of managing all these pieces of information is electronically. Without that capability, ordering becomes a major challenge.

The range of processes associated with ordering is heavily influenced by how the orders are communicated, the degree of standardisation and where in the supply chain a business sits. For example, a bookseller could send an order to a distributor via telephone, email, one of the established electronic ordering platforms (such as TeleOrdering) or even via a sales rep. Indeed, booksellers now have the option to send orders in near real time, rather than using the batch type processing of established electronic ordering platforms. The latter involves sending orders to a scheduled timetable or on an ad hoc basis. In near real time is literally that. An API call is initiated automatically once the order is placed in the order basket (or equivalent). Each route comes with a set of routines, each more or less onerous, reliable and efficient. Orders sent via one of the industry’s trading platforms will be fulfilled more quickly and efficiently once the batch orders are received, given that there is no manual intervention. These orders will go directly into the supplier’s order processing pool for pick, pack, despatch and billing. A near real time order will reach the supplier’s order processing pool even more quickly. A manual order will need to be keyed before there is an opportunity for order fulfilment.

But even organisations with access to electronic ordering platforms will not use them 100% of the time. There is a misconception that phoning an order through to a supplier is quicker and will lead to more accurate information in terms of price, availability and expected delivery date. It won’t. Call centre staff handling telephone orders will source information from the same computer system as that handling electronic P&A enquiries, orders and order acknowledgements.

In an ideal world, the recipient of the order should provide an order acknowledgement back to the bookseller confirming receipt of that order and its availability (regardless of whether the availability was previously checked through a P&A enquiry). It removes any ambiguity about if and when the book will be supplied. But this hardly ever happens, thereby risking a whole new set of exchanges between the bookseller and supplier if the order doesn’t arrive within whatever is deemed a reasonable timeframe.

And what if the order doesn’t arrive at all, but sits on backorder? How do you readily housekeep unfulfilled order lines?