Image by Joel Bez, CC license

Digital commerce isn’t just about selling your goods on the internet; it’s also about digitizing the whole flow of information in your company. Loads of activities within your enterprise can benefit from simple digital technologies, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Writing about OCR is right up there with writing about advances in FM radio, right? OCR is like what, from the 70s? And haven’t most companies digitized most or all of their paper documents?

No.  Where studies have been done, they have found that, for example, more than half of U.S. businesses still use paper invoices, and globally less than 10% of total estimated invoices are paperless.

And, OCR + software = big benefits.  Advanced OCR has

• Template-matching so that the software looks for and finds the right value in the right place on the page;
• Self-learning whereby word and character images are compared to a standard over time and the software learns which images have high probability of a match; and
• Re-purposing of the digital content created from paper scanning.

These advances have opened three large avenues of opportunity for nearly every business.

Audit.  Anything on paper documents can be compared to digital contracts, shipping documents, tax laws, official government documents, calendars, tariffs, tax tables, utility rates, pricing tables, or any other established numeric parameters.

Exception Management.  Everything that is digitized and audited against numeric parameters will have a result: the value is within the contract limits, matching the contracted rate, etc.  Exceptions can be identified, routed to email, returned to sender.  Reports can be written that summarize number of invoices processed and paid according to contract parameters, and number rejected, along with the contents of the rejected invoices.

Analytics.  Tens of thousands of paper documents (like Bills of Lading) of which thousands may have adjusted quantities or notations can be isolated, summarized and categorized.  Patterns can be established depending on the item, customer, delivery point, or mode of transportation.

Plenty of vendors will sell you software, but why bother – its much easier to contract with service providers. Better yet, outsource the whole business process; this has at least three advantages: 1) no software to buy and maintain; 2) low per-document and per-transaction costs you could never achieve on your own, and 3) flexibility to apply a variety of business rules to filter, sort, check, route, summarize and analyze data from documents.

Use a service provider with solid technology credentials and demonstrable abilities to do more than just convert paper to digital files. Your provider should be able to demonstrate profitable “use cases” where other companies have already achieved success. And the service partner you choose should have multi-language capability and knowledge of legal document retention rules for countries around the globe.

The social network is (one of) your sales channels.  Map of Facebook connections; by Michael Coghlan, CC license

“Omnichannel” commerce describes the (new) reality of being able (are you able?) to sell and deliver your goods and services to anyone, anywhere, at any time.  Not just sell, but carry the selling experience to the consumer in your own unique way.  Selling your goods through Amazon is not selling in a true B2C sense, because you don’t control the buying environment and buying experience; your stuff is on their site just like everyone else’s; all you have to do is ship the order.

And not just deliver, but completely fulfill your customer’s order in a virtual and physical sense, including returns, adjustments, credits, coupon discounts, and loyalty discounts, stuff that your current systems are probably unprepared to manage.

Consider an example:  You are a name brand manufacturer of sporting goods.  Before “omnichannel,” you sold through distributors to sporting goods retailers or directly to big box discount outlets or department stores. Your go-to-market path and the systems you needed were relatively simple.

Now, in an omnichannel world, your customers want to buy your products on Amazon, e-Bay or any number of sites, or directly from your web site delivered by Fedex, directly from you delivered to your local department store, or from inside the store but delivered to your home.  They want to use an online coupon in the store or a store coupon to buy online. They want to return everything at no cost and with no hassle.

The main point: your customers still want your goods, but the mechanics of selling to them and satisfying them have changed dramatically, requiring a whole new set of enterprise software tools.  Author and adviser Geoffrey Moore calls these tools systems of engagement, and clearly distinguishes them from the traditional systems of record most enterprises are used to.  In omnichannel, you need both, and engagement systems must work hand in hand with systems of record.

This is the value (some) e-commerce firms provide.  One of them is SPS Commerce, a small but successful company based in Minneapolis.  Other traditional EDI providers like GXS/OpenText, IBM Sterling, and SAP/Crossgate are also competing in this space, and the race to “own” omnichannel is on.

My advice:

• Your legacy ERP systems won’t get you there; you need commerce-capable systems of engagement;
• There is a lot of hype around omnichannel and therefore many vendors claiming they have the best solutions; look for years of experience in multi-channel fulfillment;
• Pick a small pilot project with narrow scope; get e-commerce vendors to let you try-and-buy;
• For a larger project such as outsourcing B2C, use a structured RFP process and compare vendors in an apples-to-apples way;
• Straight-on EDI services have become a commodity, so look for vendors that can give you other omnichannel capabilities such POS analytics and data integration, digital product and image catalogs, or configurable B2C sales platforms; or e-commerce vendors who already have a large percentage of your customers and suppliers already in their network.