You’re likely familiar with inventory management systems and how they can help your business to lower costs and deliver better customer experiences, but you may not be sure if your current solution is doing full justice to your business’s needs and goals, or, if you’re considering implementing your first inventory management system, which would be the best choice for you.
In our years of experience working with clients in the development of systems that work for them, we often find ourselves recommending Microsoft Dynamics 365 and LS Retail as the solutions of choice. In this piece we outline their key features, what makes them stand out, and compare them with each other.
Microsoft Dynamics 365: A Comprehensive ERP Solution
With the power of Microsoft behind it, Dynamics 365 is a highly versatile, customizable and powerful ERP platform that has inventory management capabilities. It is able to bring a range of business processes together into a unified system. For retail and hospitality businesses, it offers several helpful features:
- Real-Time Inventory Tracking: An important core feature for ERPs here, Dynamics 365 provides real-time insights into inventory levels that help businesses to make informed decisions about stock replenishment and management.
- Omnichannel Capabilities: With the rise of omnichannel retailing, Dynamics 365 allows businesses to manage inventory and customer interactions across various physical and digital channels seamlessly. This integration offers the ability to deliver consistency in a customer’s experience, wherever and however they are interacting with your brand’s channels.
- Data Analytics and Reporting: Dynamics 365 comes equipped with advanced analytics tools. These tools help businesses to understand sales patterns, predict future trends, and to make powerful data-driven decisions, another feature that stands this platform out from many other ERP softwares.
- Supply Chain Management: Dynamics 365 excels in supply chain optimization. It offers features such as automated replenishment, order management, and vendor collaboration, which are crucial for maintaining efficient operations in the retail and hospitality sectors.
- Customer Relationship Management: Beyond inventory, Dynamics 365 also integrates CRM capabilities, enabling businesses to create personalized experiences for their customers that lead to better results and more sales.
That’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 in a nutshell, now we turn to another solution that we often recommend, LS Retail.
LS Retail: Tailored for Retail and Hospitality
LS Retail brings a suite of features specifically designed for the nuances of retail and hospitality businesses:
- User-Friendly Interface: LS Retail is known for its intuitive interface, making it easy for staff to manage inventory without hitting a steep learning curve.
- Detailed Inventory Management: LS offers detailed inventory tracking abilities, including in-depth monitoring and reporting on stock, sales history, and product performance. This granularity helps businesses to make precise inventory decisions.
- Hospitality Features: Alongside retail-like features tailored to hospitality like POS, it’s also possible to create and manage room bookings, housekeeping activities, events and ticketing, and much more.
- Integrated Point of Sale (POS) System: LS Retail combines inventory management with a robust POS system. This provides real-time inventory updates with every sale which is very important for truly optimized inventory management today.
- Customizable Reports: LS Retail provides customizable reporting tools that enable businesses to analyze various aspects of their operations, from sales and inventory to employee performance.
- E-commerce Integration: For businesses operating both online and offline, LS Retail’s e-commerce integration ensures a unified inventory across all sales channels.
Can Dynamics 365 and LS Retail Be Integrated Together?
Yes! Because LS retail is built on the core Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem, it’s highly integrable with Microsoft Dynamics, making it a versatile way for retailers to connect their operations together under one platform.
Both are highly customizable and integrable through APIs. For example, it’s possible to link your POS hardware to feed customer-linked sales data through to your Dynamics 365 platform. In this way, the general power and versatility of Microsoft Dynamics is complemented by the retail-specific features that LS Retail brings to the table.
The other way around is also possible. For example, there may be a rewards scheme that you’re running based on CRM-linked customer purchasing data, if a customer with a profile buys enough defined products via your channels, it’s possible to automatically generate a voucher for them. Let’s say the customer is at the till in your staff, at the checkout, the POS alert a staff member using your POS that they have a voucher available; they can then offer to apply it for them at the checkout, making for a delightful experience! This is just a couple of the many ways that Dynamics 365 and LS Retail can complement each other.
How Do I Choose the Best Inventory Management or ERP Solution for My Business?
Both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and LS Retail offer compelling features for retail and hospitality businesses. Of course, while we believe these two are amongst the best solutions on the market, it’s also true that the ideal inventory management and/or ERP solutions for each business can vary.
Alongside this, it’s also true that the choice between them or other pairs of solutions is not an either/or decision, it can be a ‘yes, and’ decision! It can take time to figure out which solutions are the best for your business and to design and configure them too. However, given the systematic benefits that they can offer, it’s certainly worth investing time and energy into solutions like these, as they can help your business to scale to new heights.
Discover How to Empower Your Success: Book A Systems Discovery Call
Helping you to succeed starts with finding the right opportunities for you that lie within the technological territory. Want to see how technology can both power your success and make your life easier? Book a systems discovery call with us; we’ll be glad to learn about your business, answer your questions and help you to enhance your success, growth and customer delivery, using the power of technology.
