I recently had to do a demo where I needed to show cross-store capabilities of the mPOS.  For example, order in store A but pickup in store B.  I was also asked to do some cross-store returns (buy in store A, return in store B).   While preparing for my demo, I realized that we only have one demo mPOS store set up for each "brand" of the 3 brands that we use in our demo data (Contoso (Boston), Adventureworks (Seattle), Fabrikam (Houston)).

Since my demo was aligned to Fashion, I wanted to create a second "Fabrikam" store.   While I could have setup a new Retail channel and built it all from scratch, it made more sense and appeared to be more efficient to modify an existing store.   I decided that I wanted to change the Seattle store from being Adventureworks themed and assorted to now being a Fabrikam store.   There were a lot of steps I went through to get this done, so I wanted to share this with others to hopefully help others out in the future with this so you won't have to go through as much trial and error as I did to get it all working!   Below are the steps with pictures to help you out.   Please help me to improve this posting and my other blogs by adding comments if you have any feedback!!

As you will note, the Seattle Store mPOS looks like this in our demo data:

Here is a step by step on how to change the above so that it is a Fabrikam store with Fabrikam products/catalogs, etc....

       1. Go to the Seattle retail channel and change the navigation hierarchy and publish

• USRT/Retail/Common/Retail channels/Retail stores
• From Set Up tab, go into Store Product Attributes Form

• Edit and change Category Hierarchy from “Adventureworks” to “Fashion”

• Click “Publish Channel Updates” from this form

2. Publish the Channel from the Retail Stores form

3. Go to assortments and add Seattle to Fashion assortments you are using for your demo, remember to Publish the assortment.

4.  Run the "Process Assortments" job from the Periodic menu

     5.   Go into the published catalogs for Houston (in demo data these are the Dress sale and the Men’s Suits sale catalogs), Edit these catalogs, add Seattle channel, republish (remember to run workflow to completely process and republish catalog).

   Note when publishing the catalog I chose to change the selection to “all products” instead of just products that have changed – not sure if this matters, but it worked well for me

6.   If you have set up any special promotions or price, make sure the Seattle store is included in your price groups as well for consistency of pricing between Houston and Seattle.  This is done in various forms such as the trade agreements form, the mix   and match or discounts form, etc...

 7.  Note that in the demo data, worker 000154 is tied to a Visual Display for the AdventureWorks store – if you plan to use this worker, make sure to remove or change this so that the Fabrikam layout is used.   Do this for any other Workers to ensure the right mPOS screens display.

8.  Change the Visual Profile of Seattle-3 Register to a Fabrikam mPOS – if you don’t do this, your logon screen and backgrounds on the mPOS will still shows “Adventureworks” images:

9.  Go to Data Group and run 1070, 1040, 1050, 1060, 1090.  If you needed to update any pricing, also remember to run 1020.  Note that it is VERY important you run the 1070 job against the data group and not the individual channels or from the normal distribution jobs form.  Due to the mPOS needing information from the HoustonDB in order to activate a new mPOS, it is always best to run jobs from here to ensure not just the delta data is sent.  There is a known issue where the retail channel publishing data is not getting  updated properly for 1070 unless you run a full-sync from this channel data group form.  The other jobs you could run from the standard distribution jobs form if desired....

You should  be set from the AX side, now you must activate or logon to the mPOS with your mPOS that is linked to the Seattle register or activate a new mPOS for Seattle-3 (or whatever Seattle register you have created for mPOS – Seattle-3 is already in the demo data).

10.  Open mPOS application and reset it

11.   From “Devices” form in AX, make sure to set Seattle-3 back to Pending status:

 12. Re-activate your mPOS for the Seattle-3 register

 Your Seattle store should now look like a Fabrikam Store!

As you may know, just this past December we released our RTM version of our Modern POS solution (known as mPOS).   At NRF we were able to really showcase this new product and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.  I wanted to use this blog post to point out my top 5 reasons why I believe that deploying the Dynamics AX mPOS solution will allow retailers to really “change the game” when it comes to in-store systems.

1.   Engaging with your customers when they arrive, not when they check out

As shoppers, we’ve all experienced “traditional” retail.  You walk in a store, perhaps you are greeted with a very general “can I help you” greeting ....but the sales associate has no idea who you are in most cases (unless you frequent the store quite often).  If you are greeted, you may decide to ask for help, or you may decide not to bother since you don’t think they will know enough about what you are looking for to truly be a help to you.  If you do engage, often you find that the Sales Associate is trying to sell you things you don’t want.  Sometimes you even have to politely ask to be left alone (because it becomes apparent that the Associate has no idea of your actual tastes or preferences).   Of course, many retailers are not even greeting you at the door, you are left on your own to roam the shop and fill your basket and your first interaction with a store employee may not be until you reach the checkout counter to pay for your purchases.

If you are a retailer, your goal is to engage the customer, keep them interested and keep them buying.  If you never make contact with the customer until they are checking out, it’s pretty much impossible to capture their interest at the checkout counter. In most cases, your customer is already tired and ready to leave, they aren’t interested in your help or sales suggestions now. The customer may have even been standing in a long line and just wants to pay and go.  The checkout time at the traditional cash wrap is really one of the worst times to have a first identification/interaction with your customer.  In addition, often times the customer isn’t ever truly identified at the store.  If they are identified, it typically is not until they provide their loyalty card or other identification.  Again, this is way too late in the process for your Sales Associate to finally know the customer and interact at the checkout counter.

The key is knowing who your customer is when they ENTER the store!  This is where mPOS can be a game changer.  By deploying the mPOS on mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones, your Sales Associates are now empowered with the data they need to really engage with the customer. They can use the mPOS to look up the customer data by scanning the customer’s card or searching for the customer at the time they greet them at the door or on the sales floor. Not to mention that you can extend the mPOS to allow things like RFID tags in loyalty cards or other technology to identify customers and bring up their data in the mPOS.  Unless this is a brand new customer, your Sales Associate will now have a wealth of useful information at their fingertips to help direct the customer to the products that make the most sense.  

These screen shot below gives you an idea of the type of information we can put forward from AX or other CRM systems (with integration) to empower your Sales Associates. Knowing information about the customer such
as their recent purchases (not just from your store, but from any of your sales channels), wish list items (from your ecommerce site or mobile application), and even data like their loyalty points balance (“did you know you have enough points to get $10 off your purchase today?”) are all things that can totally change the conversation. Now the customer doesn’t feel your Sales Associate is just being pushy – this Sales Associate actually knows who you are!   If you are a fashion retailer, incorporating data on this screen like the customer’s size or color preferences, or even information about their family members and birth dates can all help your Sales Associate to increase basket size (“I noticed your husband’s birthday is in 2 weeks – can I show you some ties that we have on sale?”).

2. Making your Sales Associates as smart as your Customers

One of the things we often hear is that the customer knows more about the products than the Sales Associates do in the store. Customers have so much information at their fingertips that often-times the Sales Associate can’t really impress the customer with information that they don’t already know.  By the time the customer arrives in your store, they have probably already researched online and may even continue the research process in-store with their smartphones. Sales Associates typically don’t have the same access to the content, or if they do it requires them to leave the customer's side to go to a fixed computer or perhaps use their personal smartphones to try to keep up with the customer’s knowledge.

This brings me to the second reason as to why using the Dynamics AX mPOS is empowering for your Sales Associates...product data!!!!  The mPOS allows users to “shop” not only your in-store inventory, but inventory sold in other locations or channels if desired.  The rich content user-interface design allows both the Sales Associate and the customer (while standing next to the associate or by taking hold of the mobile device themselves) to see pictures of products, read marketing copy, review item attributes such as size and color options, or even review more detailed information such as care instructions or item dimensions or weight.   Any of the AX product attributes can be extended to display on this product details screen.

Now your Sales Associate not only has the product information they need in a handy mobile device, but they can also lure the customer away from their own smartphone screens and share the mPOS screens with the customer. Now your Sales Associate is back “in charge” and can get engaged with the customer while providing the information the customer needs. 

A really neat feature added to the mPOS allows a side by side comparison of multiple products.  If your customer is undecided, presenting them with this view may just be what they need to help drive them to a final decision.

3.  Mobility, Mobility, Mobility

One of the biggest benefits of the mPOS user interface is that it can be deployed on tablets or smartphones. This relates back to my original point about getting your Sales Associates out on the floor and engaged. Now your associates can be mobile, but are still armed with the information they need to really work with the customers on the sales floor. Remembering that outside of all of this customer and product data, the mPOS is a full POS solution – so if the associate would like to complete the sale and collect payment in the middle of the sales floor, they are able to do that.  

New retail server architecture concepts even allow you to take the store anywhere. The mPOS can be deployed on a tablet or smartphone and can leave the confines of your brick and mortar store while connecting to a retail server hosted at a data center or in the cloud. This makes things like a parking lot tent sale or taking your store to a trade show or other event really easy without a lot of complex hardware/technology logistics. Even creating a quick “pop
up” during the holidays is easy to do from a store technology perspective when using our mPOS technology. Added offline support is also available for many devices in those situations where your network connectivity to the retail server may be severed or spotty.  

The other neat thing is that we have so many hardware options that allow the mPOS to be used as a mobile device, but also docked and used as a traditional POS device at the cash wrap counter if desired. This Toshiba TCxFlight device was one that we demonstrated at NRF. A very neat device that can pop off the base to be a mobile tablet with a portable MSR and barcode scanner, but can also be docked and hooked into traditional POS hardware for a more standard checkout experience. Dell and HP also make similar devices which really can help the retailer save on hardware expenses (not to mention counter space as the footprint of these new solutions is so much smaller than the traditional POS hardware we used to use!).

4.    Never lose the sale!

Because the Dynamics AX mPOS is powered by the Dynamics AX ERP application, and AX can manage all of your channel inventory, this allows the Sales Associate to view inventory availability in other stores across the chain, or even in other channels (like DC inventory, etc...), there is really no reason to ever lose a sale due to out of stocks.   The Sales Associate now not only has the ability to find the inventory elsewhere, but can then easily transition into setting up a sales transaction that will allow the customer to have the item shipped to them or allow them to pick the item up in another location if they desire.  The Dynamics AX ERP provides the central hub for all sales transactions which allows for a transaction to start in one channel and be completed in another without any complex integrations.  I am always shocked when I am shopping for an item and the Sales Associate simply tells me they don’t have any in stock and they don’t know when more will arrive.... so many retailers do not have the ability to drill into their supply chain or their other inventory sources to “save the sale”.  The functionality provided in the Dynamics AX mPOS really makes this possible.

5.       Multi-Functional Devices

In addition to providing customer information, product information and being a traditional POS checkout device, the mPOS can provide functionality for inventory management tasks and overall store management tasks.  

With the proper security, this same application that can be used for sales can also be used to receive inventory or perform a stock count.  In addition, a full suite of reports can easily be accessed from the device to provide managers or other supervisors in-store with store sales activity data and individual sales associate performance in real-time at any point in the day.

Features like clock in and out and safe and bank drop capabilities also allow for additional in-store functionality to be performed from the mPOS.

The mPOS is extensible as well, so you can add-in links to other systems or programs to make the mPOS your main “hub” for all in-store applications.

Unlike other mobile POS solutions that may only allow you to use them to scan items and accept payment, and are not extensible for the retailer, the Dynamics AX mPOS can perform many additional functions to make it the only application you need in-store.

To recap, I was really excited to present these mPOS concepts to retailers at NRF this year. I really do believe our Dynamics AX mPOS is a game changer and I cannot wait to see it in action at a store near me!

Hi Everyone,

I thought I'd start off my first AX Retail related post with an overview of the new Customer Search capabilities in Dynamics AX 2012 R3.

Dynamics AX 2012 R3 was released with some new capabilities to enable the call center channel as part of our Omni-channel retail solution.  Now, in addition to the Retail Store and Ecommerce Channels, we also have a Call Center channel option that can be setup and configured and used to create sales orders in AX that come through the more traditional phone call or mail order route. 

The call center functionality that was put into AX 2012 R3 originated from the acquisition of an ISV product that was developed in Dynamics AX. This ISV product has been implemented successfully over the years at many direct-to-consumer retailers to allow AX to function more appropriately for 'B to C' sales order creation and sales order management vs. the traditional Dynamics AX sales ordering processes which is a much more 'B to B' industry specific design.

As luck would have it, I was the original product manager of that acquired ISV product between the years of 2004-2007, so I have a pretty good understanding of the capabilities here and wanted to use some of my blog posts to share this information. 

First, a little business insight on this topic of customer search:

For those of you that have been working with AX for a long time, you may know that in the past if you wanted to search for a customer to apply to a sales transaction, you had a few options:  You could use a drop-down list that showed all customers in the database and then use the standard AX field filtering tools to narrow down your customers to find the one you wanted to select.   You could also use some standard filters provided in the customer list page.    While these are good features, if you think about our Retail and Direct to Consumer-based customers that use Dynamics AX - these companies are going to have potentially millions of customer records in the customer database.   Unlike B to B companies that may have a few hundred customers, Retailers/B to C companies often connect with millions of different customers....some of the oldest retailers out there will claim to have over 50 million records in their customer database!! 

B to C retail companies typically never delete or purge a customer from their customer list.   Most retailers will spend a lot of time and money updating their lists based on National Change of Address (NCOA) data as well as general cleaning and de-duping their lists to make sure the information about each person is as accurate as they can get it.  This information is used for continued marketing efforts.  In some cases, B to C/Retail companies will also sell this customer contact information to other sources to market additional products or services to that customer (unless the customer has specifically opted out of this type of program).

So, if you can imagine clicking on the standard AX customer dropdown and trying to filter through millions of records - you can imagine it is probably not very user-friendly or efficient!   This is where the new customer search feature comes in handy.

Also important to note: B to C retailers typically keep 2 separate databases for names and addresses/contact info.  One is the traditional customer database which of course houses all of their customer data (even if the customer has not ordered in years, they are still considered a customer).  The second database contains the 'prospect' list.  This prospect database is full of names and addresses of people that have not yet purchased from the retailer, but the retailer is actively targeting them with marketing offers in hopes that they will one day become a customer. The retailer may have purchased these names/addresses from a vendor, or may have rented the name/contact information for a limited time in an effort to market to these contacts.   In case you haven't figured it out yet - the selling and buying of your contact information is a very important business opportunity for many retailers!

Because B to C retail companies are working with 2 different lists that must be separated, there is a very important business need to be able to search for and locate the potential matching customer or prospect information in a single search.   Imagine if you were a call center representative and you receive a call from a person who wishes to place an order, this person is not an existing customer, but is in the prospect database due to previous marketing activity.   The call center rep is not going to know this and therefore can't be expected to search 2 different databases in a 2-step process to see if they can find the record vs. creating a new one.  This would take a lot of time and most certainly annoy your new customer!  That is why the R3 customer search features of Dynamics AX will search both the AX CustTable and the AX smmBusRelTable at the same time and show results on a single form!   By allowing the call center rep to search on both customers and prospects, if a prospect record is the match, the user can then select it and convert them to a customer**

By using that prospect record vs. creating a new customer record, the business can now retain all of the history of the marketing efforts they may have been tracking against the prospect in AX CRM.  By being consistent with the prospect-to-customer-conversion data, the business can now track that customer through their journey and have that historical data timeline of when they began to target them until the time they became a customer... this type of analytical data can help a business understand how they can more effectively target,convert and retain customers, so by keeping the timeline intact, this data is much easier to access.

In the following video, I will provide an overview of customer search capabilities in AX 2012 R3 using call center functionality. 

Thanks for visiting my blog and please leave feedback or suggestions on what you would like to see in future posts! 

 -Holly

**Please note that in the current CU8 release of AX 2012 R3, there was a reported issue with searching for and converting prospect records from the customer search results form.  Please contact your AX product support team for more information on the solution if you encounter any issues using this functionality.

This first blog post is more of a test for me since this is my first blog.  I hope to continue posting on this over time with some additional tips, tricks and information about AX for Retail that I want to share with the greater community.

A little about me:

I have been working with AX since 2004.   I have spent my entire career working in the retail industry.   I started out working in retail operations at various retail and direct-to-consumer catalog companies.  I moved into the technology world in 1999 with another retail software company.   In 2004 I started working with AX and have always focused my attention to building out solutions on AX for retail organizations.   I was a product manager for many years and built a lot of IP for AX in the retail and Omni-channel order management space.   Now I work at Microsoft as a pre-sales specialist on the National Retail team.   On a daily basis I am working with the AX Retail product and helping to evangelize the benefits of the platform to retailers all over the country. 

Since I have spent so many years working with AX and in the retail industry, I wanted to create this blog as a place to share some thoughts, ideas and tips.  Before Microsoft acquired all of the various IP solutions and released their first version of a retail solution in AX back in 2009, I had already been out in the field working with and writing specs/product managing many of the products that were acquired by Microsoft.  I want to utilize my years of product and industry experience to hopefully share additional information about our retail solutions and ideas to help you better implement or sell the solution.

That's all for now - in my next post I plan to review some of the new Call Center capabilities of R3!!!

-Holly