Best Practices In Tracking Vendor Progress

IRT sits down with Michele Salerno, Director of Marketing and Sales, at Celerant Technology about automating POs, best practices in tracking vendor progress, and more.

IRT: Explain the importance of integrating with vendor catalogs to eliminate manual entry of products into database.

Salerno: The most obvious answer — and the one that most retailers can immediately relate to — is the number of labor hours it saves by not having to manually enter product information. When performed manually, it’s a very time consuming process just to get all of the right information in the right place. It’s also easy to introduce mistakes like typos, so once all the information is transcribed, someone has to go back and double check to make sure it is accurate.

However, the advantages go much further than that in that vendor catalog integration actually improves retailer/vendor relationships. When dealing with retailers that integrate with their catalogs, vendors know that they no longer have to send out alerts every time they update their products. Any time retailers refresh the catalog through the integration platform, anything new the vendor added is immediately visible. Vendors also love feeling in control of their brands, and they know that retailers that integrate with their catalogs have immediate access to their images and product descriptions. They don’t have to worry about a retailer using photos or words that do not align with their brand.