Cool Industry Innovations with the Aforza Winter ’22 Release

At Aforza, innovative growth is one of our core values and we deliver 3 seamless releases each year; all available automatically across both our online & offline mobile applications.

Customer and employee interactions are increasingly taking place via mobile, virtual and distributed channels which makes it impossible for many businesses to keep up. To stay competitive, businesses need to deliver a Total Experience (TX) that is people-centric and combines customer experience, employee experience, and user experience together with a collective focus on business outcomes.

With this in mind, we’ve pulled together a summary of the key highlights from our Winter 22 Release that we’re most excited to share with you across Trade Promotion Planning & Optimization, On-Device Offline Mobile Experience and Digital Asset Management.

• Aforza Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO) provides a suite of new capabilities to support the continuous improvement of trade promotion strategies.

• Real-time insights allow you to optimize strategies based on your business goals and current supply and promotion constraints. This allows you to maximize the value every dollar invested in trade promotions.

• There is now a Promotion Planning Dashboard that can be used to optimize spend and target the correct customers by displaying a real-time view into promotion performance, inventory levels, sales order insights, budgets & funds, plans & objectives.

• The Promotion Insights Tab now offers real time insights into how a single promotion is performing, including individual SKU performance within the promotion, promotion performance over time, and overall promotion profit & loss. It also enables real time changes to promotions to maximise their effectiveness.

• The promotion calendar is now localized depending on the running user’s selected language and locale.

• Aforza Mobile provides you with a rich suite of capabilities built specifically for the needs of a consumer goods field team. All available offline and without internet connectivity.

• Custom Filters can now be applied to offline objects, allowing you to control precisely what data is brought offline to the mobile app.

• Users can now create unique business logic which their field users can execute without an internet connection through our Offline Smart Actions capability. Examples of this logic include Credit Checks, Delivery Validation and Order Validation.

• Record Types can now be configured and used in the mobile configuration file. Define different mobile layouts for each record type and have them respected in the mobile experience.

• New Order Items Custom Forms are now available – an item in the cart can be long pressed to open up the form and enter any details needed. This is useful for scenarios where you need to flag a specific order item with additional information during order capture.

• Empower your sales teams with the data and processes they need to execute visits and orders at their target customer outlets.

• We now offer an improved Audit Modern Trade User Interface; when completing an audit on tablet devices a new grid based inline editing interface is used. The new interface makes the use more efficient and is completely configurable to add as many fields as needed.

• To enhance visit execution, users now have the ability to view their visits by either visit date/time or a predefined sequence number with Visit Sequence.

• Account Validation Information now displays the minimum and maximum order thresholds for a customer, along with their remaining credit, during the order.

• With Edit Order & Mid Configuration, custom forms can now let you both edit an order’s details at any point and also insert more data after completing the cart configuration step.

• Greater Credit Note Support now allows invoices to be generated as credit notes instead. Credit notes let you capture details of credit given to the customer as part of a return. Additionally, Multiple Invoices and credit notes can now be selected in the payment collection screen, allowing the customer to pay off several at once as the balance due on the invoices and credit notes are combined to provide a single figure for the customer to enter.

• A new Transaction Tab is available which shows all previous transactions and lets the user access them to print additional receipts.

• Aforza Digital Asset Management is a brand new platform capability that allows users to manage the end to end lifecycle of all their digital content. It has been released as Limited Availability in Aforza Winter 22.

• Digital Asset Management is automatically pre integrated with the other Aforza applications.

• Store all your assets within the elastic and scalable Aforza Digital Asset Management cloud storage. The multi-tenant storage is a highly available, secure, and scalable solution for holding all of your documents, images, brochures, marketing material, and other digital content.

• A new component is available on Aforza Consumer Goods record pages to upload, view, and manage your digital assets. The record asset manager lets you associate your digital assets directly to data within your applications.

• Example use cases include adding promotion brochures and marketing materials to your promotions, adding product images and labelling details to your products, uploading contracts and other important documents to your accounts, and tracking images and other field captured content on visits and audits.

With all of these new innovations and capabilities, the Aforza industry cloud & mobile solution continues to help consumer goods companies sell more and grow faster.

And, with 3 releases a year across 4 platforms, our innovation isn’t slowing down.

Check out the demo below: