Launching a new ecommerce website may seem daunting. Whether businesses are building their first online store or replatforming from an existing system, creating a feature-rich ecommerce website from start to finish takes time, energy and resources. Organizations typically spend five to eight months or more determining which ecommerce solution to use, drafting the system architecture, designing how it will look and actually developing the storefront and integrating third party extensions.

As e-commerce sales continue to increase, drop shipping becomes the norm and overall expectations around shipping make customer satisfaction more difficult to achieve, competitive advantage for companies that sell or distribute products ultimately comes down to a warehouse’s ability to deliver orders faster and more accurately than ever. Using spreadsheets and paper to track inventory as it moves through the warehouse will no longer suffice.

Uncovering insights about the business and then properly visualizing the data in a meaningful way can be a challenge even for the best of business analysts. Even with a unified business system like NetSuite, people have turned to other applications or spreadsheets to create pivot tables and charts with their business’s data.

According to a recent report from Gallup, 85% of the global workforce is “not engaged or actively disengaged at work.” That is an extremely high percentage of workers and should concern business leaders. Employees who are engaged tend to produce more quality work, refer top talent to the company, achieve their goals and help others grow and develop. HR technology can play a role in helping employees engage more with self-service experiences to get answers to questions faster, being rewarded and recognized for a promotion, and automating tedious processes that sometimes get in the way of the enjoyable parts of work.

The holidays are over but many businesses still have significant amounts of seasonal inventory left in the warehouse. Meanwhile, they expect approximately 11% of sales will be returned resulting in even more inventory. The longer these items sit in the warehouse, the more costs they incur and the harder they become to get rid of.