Spring 22’ is Aforza’s 9th release, marking another milestone in our continued innovation. With growth at the heart of what we do, both for our company and our customers, we deliver 3 seamless releases a year; all available automatically across both our online & offline mobile applications.
This release delivers continued innovation on top of Aforza’s Consumer Goods applications, the Aforza Retail Execution mobile app, and the Aforza Cloud engines. Spring ‘22 also makes the Aforza Digital Asset Management solution generally available for storing and managing your digital content at scale.
As always, this release is driven by both what our customers are telling us and our strategic vision for taking the Consumer Goods industry forward. Let’s dive into some of the fresh new innovations and expand on key highlights from the release that we’re most excited to share with you.
Aforza Digital Asset Management
As businesses globally continue to digitalize, the value of effective Digital Asset Management has never been more important. The ability to gather these assets in one centralized hub where authorised users can review, edit and share consistent data is invaluable, which is why we’re putting such strategic focus on our Digital Asset Management capabilities.
Aforza Digital Asset Management provides a secure and scalable cloud platform for digital assets with complete omnichannel access, including mobile offline, to support Retail Execution & Trade Promotion Management processes.
Here are some of the exciting updates below across mobile Digital Asset Management, access in context of a business process, permissions sets and secure and scalable cloud storage.
Mobile Digital Asset Management
Exciting enhancements have been made to digital asset management and mobile device integration. The Account, Visit and Product resources now fully support digital assets and are available to sync and view offline.
In addition, Audit resources are also available to sync and view offline, providing the opportunity to capture images when confirming compliance in-store.
Contextual Asset Management
Viewing and allocating digital assets in the context of application business processes has never been easier. With updates to permission sets, it is now possible to designate the extent to which individual users can view and edit digital assets. This helps to ensure that the right assets are getting in front of the right people.
Additionally, with the new Record Asset Management capability, digital assets can be associated directly to their pertinent data. For example, promotion assets for specific products can be accessed directly from the product page, and audit images are linked directly to the audit itself.
Secure & Scalable Cloud Storage
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.
Key Account Management
Continual shifts in retailer priorities are making supplier negotiations tougher. It’s time for Consumer Goods companies to overhaul their approach to key account management.
Leading companies are building trustful and productive year-long collaborations with their customers and creating joint business plans aimed at helping both supplier and retailer economics. Aforza has created a suite of new capabilities to support a more modern Key Account Management (KAM) strategy.
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Account 360° View: Gain a complete view of an account’s hierarchies and key relationships, as well as visibility into all engagement activity across channels.
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Real-time Data & Insights on Account Performance: Get real-time insights, from a range of commercial data sources, across all aspects of your key account performance.
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Integrated Trade Promotions: Optimize trade spend and target key customers by displaying a real-time view into promotion performance, inventory levels, sales order insights, budgets & funds, plans & objectives.
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Retail Execution Checks from Field Sales Teams: Leverage your teams in the field to check key account compliance and take promotion-based order capture with penny-perfect pricing on mobile; online or offline.
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Digital Asset Management: Ensuring all important business documents are centralised and accessible against the account, such as contracts and Joint Business Plans.
Order Capture & Mobile Execution
Aforza Order Capture capabilities deliver omnichannel ordering with penny-perfect promotion execution, both online and mobile offline, and now with full support for Unit of Measure. A suite of new features and upgrades have been added enabling a more seamless experience throughout the order management process.
Our Offline Mobile Pricing engine now supports manual discounts at point of order, allowing you to set manual discounts to apply against the entire order amount, including promotions.
It is also now possible to take Partial Payments against a total amount during payment capture, making the order capture process easier for every customer. And, enhanced Tax Calculation allows for standard or grouped levels, making it more accommodating to individual account needs.
Unit of Measure
With the new highly configurable Units of Measure function, it is simple of meet individual order needs with parent-child related pricing and amounts – e.g boxes of 12, 24 or 100.
Unit of measure configuration enables the creation of a product hierarchy, supporting multiple units of measure for a related product. The UoM shown will appear during the Order Capture journey when a parent UoM product has been selected from the Catalog.
Mobile UX / UI Enhancements
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. We are always on a mission to improve the Aforza experience, and making upgrades to our UX/UI supports a more streamlined journey. With new practical features, such as the ability to enter promotion quantities during order capture and aesthetic features like a new tablet header, the Aforza application is looking and functioning better than ever.
Mobile Sync Performance
The ability to sync data from the field offline is one of the cornerstones of Aforza’s product innovation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still work being done to make it even more effective and efficient.
Performance enhancements have been made to make the sync up & sync down processes even faster. And now, with custom sync filters for audit and inventories, it’s possible to define exactly what data should be synchronized offline to the mobile application.
Grow with Aforza
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 these exciting capabilities in action with our Building Winning Relationships with Your Retailers webinar below: