Why your fixture and signage deliveries are a mystery and how to solve it
By Cary Child, Software Sales Engineer
Once you’ve figured out what fixtures, signage and supplies your stores need and which vendors provide each item, you face another critical question: where’s your order?
Consider this common scenario. Your department manager discovers a broken sign and takes it down. The manager needs to know when that replacement sign will arrive, but nobody has any idea where it is.
The real problem with non-merchandise order tracking
When stores can’t track their fixture and signage orders, the problems snowball fast. The core issue is that all the systems are disconnected. Vendors don’t share updates in the same place, so there’s no common location to check order status. This means associates don’t know who to call for updates, managers can’t give realistic timelines, and finance struggles to account for expensive fixtures and signage that may or may not have arrived safely.
Take an $80,000 fixture designed to showcase a special product. The capital team needs to know it arrived in one piece. Many retailers won’t pay vendors until a formal “detail receipt” process confirms the items actually showed up where they were supposed to go.
The detail receipt isn’t just paperwork. It’s critical accounting that requires human verification of every delivery. If you ordered five signs, you must detail receipt each one. If only four arrive, you document exactly what happened to the fifth, whether it was damaged, missing or never shipped.
If an associate can figure out which vendor an order was placed with, they still may not be able to get information about the order because they don’t have the right details. Even department managers might not have access to the systems or people they need to get answers.
It doesn’t have to be this way
The good news? This frustrating reality is finally changing.
Moving goods from A to B is nothing new, but the technology available today truly is. It is possible to bring all of your non-merchandise ordering into one system. That is to say, all of your stakeholders are ready, and in most cases willing, to put the technology pieces together in a way that benefits everyone.
It’s a bold claim, historically impossible, but technology matures, companies mature and ecosystems mature. Today, most of your vendor ecosystem is already using technology and back-end systems explicitly designed to integrate with outside partners. I would argue that a plurality of your vendors expect you to come asking for true electronic integration, as the starting point. They see the benefits, too!
What this really means is the following: all of your vendor-specific non-merchandise catalogs can be normalized into one system. All your vendor-specific order transmission and acknowledgement mechanisms can be integrated seamlessly into that system. All of your logistics partners and carriers can send and receive their portion of the information from the same system as well, and they are all ready to do this.
Last but not least, the best part of this plan, where the value really shines. Your associates all have one version of the truth, in real time, with no extra effort to know or understand things far outside their core job function.
Putting it all together
An integrated approach connects ordering systems, vendor communications, delivery tracking and receipt confirmation into one workflow that finally works for everyone. Mystery solved!
Ready to bring complete order visibility to your store teams? Connect with us to learn more.