Catalog retailers and eTailers have certain distinct advantages over their brick and mortar counterparts, namely, no physical stores, and no warehouse related issues. However, low operational costs are a business-critical necessity, and our clients were frequently faced with the need to redesign their processes in ways that sustain and improve their competitive advantage. However, gaining competitive advantage requires building on proven and effective strategies by achieving operational efficiency. In addition, customer centricity doesn’t manifest at the store, it does so on the phone lines and websites. Also critical is a tight integration between back-office and order fulfillment systems. SkillNet has realized that the usual best of breed software products fall short of meeting the demands of catalogers and eTailers.

StoreHub™, SkillNet’s flagship product, has been the bedrock of custom solutions for our catalog and eTailer clients. StoreHub™ uses a common representation of entities to ensure data is translated correctly between different systems. Not only does this allow our catalog and eTailer clients flexibility in terms integrating systems and streamlining their back-office applications; future composite applications can be easily built, allowing for processes can be quickly re-engineered to adapt to customer needs.

Catalogers typically have complex business processes, a wide assortment of goods and at any given time, various editions of their catalog in sometimes as many regions. ETailers need their back office systems and processes such as inventory management and order fulfillment to be agile and tightly integrated with their website. SkillNet’s best practices help both these types of retailers realize their goals.