Every day, people all over the world slip into a pair of shoes. From the functional to the fashionable, we rely on footwear to get us from here to there. Yet a good pair of shoes does so much more. They help us run marathons, stand for hours on end at our job or make a fashion statement.
It’s no wonder that the global footwear industry brings in tens of billions of dollars every year, with the U.S. leading the way in sales. Even though footwear is considered part of the apparel industry, it’s a beast unto itself. Those who have chosen to take part in this thriving industry need advanced technological solutions to help them face its unique challenges so their business can thrive.
FDM4 understands the needs of businesses in the footwear industry, and we’ve created integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to ensure the ins and outs of your daily operations are streamlined and effective. That means industry-specific applications designed with footwear manufacturers and retailers in mind.
Every facet of the footwear industry relies heavily upon a complex set of processes, and keeping track of each aspect can become overwhelming. Our footwear inventory management system is a powerful integrated software tool which helps you manage your inventory, e-commerce, customer relations, sales orders, invoices, warehouse processes and so much more.
Below, you’ll discover how our user-friendly footwear management software is specifically designed to address your business needs and to help you manage them efficiently.
ERP Footwear Inventory Management
From the procurement of your footwear inventory to payment, there are a huge variety of processes essential to running your footwear business. ERP is the software that seamlessly integrates these various functions into one streamlined process, creating a shared database for all the information you need.
We designed our ERP system with footwear and apparel businesses in mind. In fact, we’ve spent over 20 years optimizing our ERP software to the meet the needs of the footwear industry. Forging a seamless connection between your financial accounting software, inventory system and every other aspect of your business is essential if your company has multiple locations.
Our single end-to-end software makes life easier for both your employees and head office, resulting in increased efficiency. Our unified system also eliminates gaps in communications which can cause security vulnerabilities or slow down your manufacturing process.
Our ERP Dashboard is easy to use and requires less time for implementation. You can obtain real-time data about your business, allowing you to make informed decisions quickly. All ERP software can be accessed on your business premises or anywhere via the secure cloud network.
Our ERP software includes modules which allow you to manage the different aspects of your footwear business from one convenient location, helping you run your business more intelligently. Some of the most convenient characteristics of our ERP modules include:
- Product Information: Nothing is more important to your customers than the footwear products themselves. Your inventory is more than just a bunch of shoes. The FDM4 size matrix contains the details essential to your operation as a footwear business, including style, color, size and an additional dimension for width.
- Inventory Management: Our intelligent, automated inventory management system allows you to monitor and order footwear inventory as you need it. That means you can quickly identify those items that are understocked and replenish and distribute them. Quickly find your best-selling items and maximize their visibility. You can also order using the size matrix on all your footwear products.
- Financial Accounting: Within your ERP for the footwear industry are financial accounting modules broken into the three major areas you need to run your business — Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and General Ledger. Each application is designed to be easy to use and functional and includes a wide range of abilities such as generating reports and summaries. By eliminating the need for manual entries, you reduce the risk of errors and greatly increase your efficiency.
- Purchasing: Make informed purchasing decisions with our purchasing module. You can review customer demands, check your inventory levels and even forecast your footwear company’s needs. This module also provides a centralized location for all your vendor information, improving your ability to collaborate with them.
- Order Processing: FDM4’s order entry and invoicing module makes the order life cycle as efficient and streamlined as possible. Use this comprehensive system for every aspect of your customer orders, such as quoting, entering, shipping and invoicing.
- Manufacturing: Happier customers begins with improved manufacturing performance. Our ERP interface allows you to have better oversight of the whole process including assembly times and overall performance. Easily determine raw material requirements, job routing requirements and standard amounts for labor.
E-Commerce Footwear Software That Sets Your Business Apart
Now more than ever, having an online presence is essential. Whether your customers are doing some footwear research or they’re looking to buy, everyone starts online. FDM4 E-Commerce software (ECOM) is specifically designed with the footwear industry in mind, expanding your exposure in the global market and increasing your revenue.
To compete online, you need both a B2B and B2C ECOM software solution which works with you behind the scenes. However, it also needs to be user-friendly, so your customers can easily use it to find the shoes they want. The FDM4 ECOM solution sets you up as a leader in the footwear industry in the digital age. No matter who your client is, our customer-focused system offers an experience that will keep them coming back again and again.
Our ECOM software transforms the intricacies of managing all the online information into one straightforward solution that syncs seamlessly with your FDM4 ERP software. As with all of our systems, our ECOM software provides easy-to-use interfaces, making implementing it both simple and efficient.
When you partner with FDM4 to provide you with an ECOM software solution, you can expect several distinct advantages for your footwear business:
- Watch your business grow: The internet is an incredible sales tool when leveraged successfully. Anyone can set up a website, and there are tons of generic builders that can get the job done. However, to set yourself and your footwear business apart from the thousands of shoe sites out there, you need a comprehensive e-commerce solution. Watch your business grow as you easily provide your clients with their own secure login, manage your online footwear catalogs, offer special prices and promotions and so much more.
- Smooth integration with our ERP system: No need to worry about duplicate data when you integrate our ECOM software with our user-friendly ERP footwear solutions. This makes your whole back-of-house streamlined, from the moment customers visit your site to shipment.
- Easy self-service for your customers: Today the majority of sites allow customers to do most of the legwork associated with their purchase — adding items to their cart, calculating shipping, making a payment and even tracking their shipment. With our ECOM software, your clients have access to your inventory in real-time, allowing your customer service representatives to focus on more than service calls.
- Template-based designs: Most people aren’t web designers, which makes it essential to find ECOM software that allows you to simply and easily set up and manage your site. Our template-based designs enable you to control how your website looks and feels and maintain all the business data elements you need to create a powerful web presence.
- Useful for any footwear business: Whether you sell to other footwear businesses or directly to the consumer, you can customize our FDM4 E-Commerce software to your industry needs.
Take Your Sales Force to the Next Level With an Effective CRM System
Sales are the lifeblood of any footwear company. However, your sales department staff aren’t the only ones responsible. Your business needs a connective customer relationship management (CRM) solution that joins every aspect of your business together, including your ERP and warehouse management system (WMS).
CRM is the backbone that forms your company’s relationships with new clients as well as allowing you to maintain your current clientele. An effective CRM system will keep you connected, streamline a variety of communication processes, make your customers happy and, of course, increase the profitability of your footwear business.
FDM4 brings you CRM solutions designed to take your sales force to the next level. We produce our software with the footwear industry’s needs in mind. And it all starts with the ability to access all your client’s data in real time whenever you need it. This also means your sales representatives, managers and other personnel can access sales histories, track payment info and view the status of any current orders.
Your FDM4 CRM solution provides a huge variety of services that help you focus on building new client relationships and maintaining your organization’s current customers:
- Centralized customer data: Keep all your customer data in one, easily-accessed location. Your sales team can check out both current and prospective clients, including their contact info and comments about the relationship. Our CRM software is also easily updated as relationships grow and change.
- Follow leads: Our CRM provides direction on leads your sales team needs to increase profitability. You can view customers’ activity, check if their payments are past due and even initiate appointments within the CRM.
- Keeps your team mobile: With more and more business being conducted from mobile devices, you need a CRM solution that can be accessed this way. With the touch of their finger, your sales team has all the client information they need to improve their efficiency and sales times.
- Oversee your sales team: Our CRM system allows you to schedule and lead your sales team as well as monitor their overall performance. No need to micro-manage or walk around the office to find out what’s going on in sales.
- Keep client data secure: Your customers trust you with sensitive information that they wouldn’t want to get into the wrong hands. That’s why premium security settings are an essential part of our CRM software.
Save Time With Our Streamlined WMS
As footwear and other apparel companies become increasingly more digitized, incorporating the latest technology into your warehouse management is essential. The WMS from FDM4 offers a cost-effective and user-friendly solution, and it can be seamlessly implemented into your overarching ERP software.
An effective WMS is important to any footwear business. It allows you to handle all the different processes and operations of your warehouse as well as oversee merchandise and material as they make their way in and out.
Many WMS solutions are difficult to integrate as you must deal with confusing software add-ons, a bloated array of applications and a problematic interface. The FDM4 WMS, however, is a full-service solution that can be fully integrated with our footwear ERP. Our easy-to-use technology allows you to keep an accurate record of your inventory, maximize the available space in your warehouse and get orders filled rapidly with minimal errors while streamlining your whole warehouse procedure.
When you use the FDM4 WMS software, we ensure you get the most out of this solution with our unique advantages:
- Fully integrated with all other FDM4 software, including our easy-to-use ERP modules which give you better oversight of the whole system.
- Track and manage all of your inbound inventory.
- The Order Manager desktop tool releases work to your warehouse in waves for your warehouse personnel to pick up.
- Keep an accurate record of every item in your footwear inventory.
- Optimize your outbound inventory, from picking, packing and shipping, reducing costs and ensuring jobs get done quickly and effectively.
Produce Your Next Footwear Design With Our PLM Software
Managing the complexities of the production, manufacturing and collaboration process requires an effective software system. Our product lifecycle management (PLM) software connects people, data and the entire process into a central repository of information. This allows everyone from your conceptual designer to the customer to be on the same page
Our PLM is specifically designed to manage the development of your footwear line from start to finish. This software ensures products are both on-time and on budget.
FDM4’s PLM offers distinct features that integrate seamlessly with our enterprise risk management (ERM) software for footwear:
- Management functionality: Managers can easily oversee the development of your products. You can reassign work to avoid a bottleneck of processes, and view costs and projected volumes in real time.
- Style summaries: Dig deeper into each style including customizable layouts by user preference. You can also arrange styles based on a variety of filters.
- Critical path: Coordinate your product development activities to individuals or partnering organizations and ensure they complete each assigned task in a timely fashion.
- Upload attachments: The FDM4 system allows you to upload notes, attachments, pictures and videos relevant to the development of your footwear product.
- Sampling: Your footwear can be compared to style standard grading tables to ensure everything is on track. You can also supply needed feedback to your supplier.
- Cost comparisons: Compare supplier cost options using flexible formats so you can make the best decision.
- Merchandiser report: Automatically update your spreadsheets with real-time information.
Why Choose FDM4 as Your Footwear Software Solution
With FDM4, you can enjoy the freedom of a fully integrated ERP software solution to manage the day-to-day challenges of the footwear industry and plan how to use your resources effectively for improved efficiency.
Our ERP system offers an easy and flexible way to manage your entire organization — providing a multi-company, multi-language, multi-warehouse solution. You and your team can handle all aspects of your business locally on the premises or remotely in the cloud with a web browser or any mobile device.
Here are some of the key features you’ll enjoy with FDM4’s ERP system as well as our other software solutions:
- End-to-end, browser-based footwear software
- Both our ERP and E-Commerce matrix accommodate a large size matrix that is used in order screens, purchase order, inventory availability and other areas in our multiple systems
- Size scales can be managed by style and by customer
- Upload information to Excel to auto-create all required items in your ERP system
- Seamlessly integrate all accounting and financial details
- Integrate ERP and E-Commerce with a single database and real-time information
- Standard interfaces for receiving external orders
- Integrated to cloud-based EDI Platform
- On-line automated customer returns process
- CRM sales tool which includes sales history and inventory availability by style, color and size
- Coordinate order fulfillment in the warehouse based on a minimum order fill percentage of size to color
- Using our vendor portal, you have access to real-time communication for local and overseas suppliers including label printing
- Integrated to browser-based WMS
- Cartonization rules for calculating freight upfront
- Customer-specific packing rules stored in the software
- Seamless integration to FedEx, UPS, USPS or LTL
Whether your footwear company is based in North America or internationally, FDM4 has the ERP software solution you need to compete on a global scale. Contact us anytime to optimize your business and update your ERP system.