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Tag Archives: Community

“We Belong to a Bigger Community” Hispanic Heritage Month Q&A

October 14, 2020   TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO BrunaWells e1602518781425 696x561 “We Belong to a Bigger Community” Hispanic Heritage Month Q&A
Bruna with her mother and grandmother in Dichato, Chile

Reading Time: 3 minutes

As a part of TIBCO’s Diversity & Inclusion initiative for Hispanic Heritage Month, we are spotlighting employees who are of Hispanic heritage, asking them what makes them proud of their heritage and what they plan to do to embrace their identity in the future.  

TIBCO: Tell us about yourself

Bruna Wells: My name is Bruna Wells and I’ve been at TIBCO for one year and five months as a Partner Account Manager in the LATAM region, based in São Paulo, Brazil. I’m from a big family—a sister of seven brothers. I’ve been with my boyfriend-now-husband Billy for 21 years. I am the mother of Caio (14) and Luana (2). At TIBCO, I participate in the BLAAC and Women of TIBCO employee resource groups (ERGs).

TIBCO: This year’s Hispanic Heritage Month theme is “Be proud Of Your Past, Embrace The Future.” What is your Hispanic heritage? 

BW: My mother is Chilean, but I was born and raised in Brazil. I spent all my adult life traveling to different Latin American countries absorbing the different cultures, way of life, and people’s histories, which have shaped my personality. So I consider myself a Latin American citizen. 

TIBCO: What about your heritage’s past are you most proud of? 

BW: The Latin American resilience. We have faced a lot of barriers to building our own identity and independence. I cannot be more proud and thankful for all our ancestors who always persevere and succeed in light of the regional, political, climate, and economic challenges we face.    

TIBCO: What ways will you “embrace your future” during Hispanic Heritage Month and beyond? 

BW: Most of the countries in Latin America celebrate Independence Day in September so this is an opportunity to talk with our families and friends about our expectations for this uncertain future that we face together. When thinking about my colleagues in TIBCO, I’m a part of the leadership team of the BLAAC ERG where we are planning several activities to make our community feel embraced and represented. 

TIBCO: In what ways do you feel the Hispanic communities have helped shape the world? 

BW: Our high energy is incomparable. We are known worldwide for our charisma, our hospitality, our parties, and our optimism, always showering others with lots of good food and drinks. In any country that you visit in Latin America, I can guarantee you will return home feeling fulfilled and loved.

TIBCO: What does being a part of the Hispanic community mean to you? 

BW: It’s diverse but in a unique way. Everyone in Latin America has a particular history, but we belong to a bigger community from different countries that understands ourselves, our culture, and our past. The identity and genuine curiosity of each person’s personal history is priceless.

TIBCO: What are the benefits of celebrating our shared history and cultures throughout TIBCO? 

BW: Working at TIBCO means that what you are and where you come from matters. I love hearing my colleague’s personal histories and feel inspired to share mine. When I know a person’s background I start to admire them and feel more connected to them. And by contributing, I expect people to feel more connected to me too.   

TIBCO: What is a Hispanic tradition that you wish to pass down, that your parents have passed down to you? 

BW: Our faith. My parents raised me to believe in God and be grateful for the small things like our food and our bed, in addition to  praying to sustain and fill our spirit. In a country where 90% of the population considers themselves religious, this is a tradition that I am already passing to my children. It represents a lot to me since my mother and father instilled it in me. 

TIBCO: Any other thoughts you would like to share related to being part of the Hispanic community within TIBCO? 

BW: Unfortunately my grandmother that lived in Chile passed away during this pandemic, and it was really hard to say goodbye to her and be there for my mother virtually. In the past several months, we had to solve a lot of challenges together and through that, a lot of our Hispanic heritage came alive again. This will always be present in our lifestyle as well as her. During this process, I could count on my team at TIBCO to support me and understand the situation.

Working at TIBCO means that what you are and where you come from matters. I love hearing my colleague’s personal histories and feel inspired to share mine. Click To Tweet

During the month of October, join us in celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Are you a TIBCO team member? To get involved and join an ERG today, visit TIBCO Connect for more details!

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Join us for Open Source Community Day October 15

August 23, 2020   TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO OpenSourceCommunityDay 696x464 Join us for Open Source Community Day October 15

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Open Source Community Day (#OSSDay) is back! 

Back in April, our TIBCO LABS team hosted our first #OSSDay; a free virtual one-day conference for developers and other technical professionals, that focused on the latest technologies in open-source.

Missed our last #OSSDay? Watch all of the sessions on-demand. 

Due to the popularity of the event, we are happy to be hosting Open Source Community Day (Fall Edition) #OSSDay, October 15th. Similar to the last event, this one will also be FREE! This event is geared for anyone interested in learning more about open source technologies.

We are happy to be hosting Open Source Community Day (Fall Edition) #OSSDay, October 15th. Similar to the last event, this one will also be FREE! Click To Tweet

The day-long interactive event featured topics such as:

  • AWS: 2020 ML Ops State of the Art
  • GitLab: Automating Kubernetes Deployments
  • Project Air: How to Collect, Process, and Visualize IoT Data the Right Way
  • And more.

We have a great lineup planned, with speakers and industry leaders from TIBCO, AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, VMware, and Women Who Code Silicon Valley. Stay tuned for more details as the agenda unfolds.

The adoption of open source technologies is continuing to grow rapidly, so join us on October 15 for #OSSDay to learn more about the latest trends in various open-source projects. Register today.

TIBCO LABS is dedicated to helping TIBCO customers adopt emerging technologies to solve their toughest business problems. The team has created various projects that implement technologies such as AI/ML, AR, blockchain, cloud, IoT, process mining, and natural language processing, all of which are open source.

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Community Summit and extreme365 Europe 2020 – Join virtual expo 30 June to 03 July – Lets together learn, connect and collaborate

June 29, 2020   CRM News and Info

Community Summit, extreme 365 is just around the corner and we can’t hold our excitement to be a part of this year’s very first virtual event. 300+ sessions, inspiring key notes and much more, this Summit is  a great way to learn, connect, discover and collaborate without stepping out of your home!

Summits are always the place where you can discover the latest Microsoft Business Applications and related 3rd party apps while speaking with the innovators who created them. It’s a place to find your technology partner and enhance your Microsoft technology stack. And like every year, Inogic has some new productivity app releases and is now a one stop hub to assist you with your Dynamics CRM, Power Platform (PowerApps, Power BI, Power Automate), Field Service, Microsoft Portals Development/Integrations requirements, that you always had in mind!

Add Inogic to your Show Planner for Special Offers
(Our Team will be online on Chat during the Event hours or please contact us anytime on crm@inogic.com)

You’ve been well versed with our popular productivity apps, most of which are already preferred apps on Microsoft AppSource namely Maplytics – our flagship product which is a native Map Visualization, Routing & Geo-analytics app for Dynamics 365 CRM and our other productivity apps for Power Platform – InoLink, Click2Clone, Click2Export, Attach2Dynamics, SharePoint Security Sync, Alerts4Dynamics, Lead Assignment & Distribution Automation and User Adoption Monitor.

So, what’s special at Inogic Booth this year?

Well not just 1 or 2 but we have 6 new app releases to be proud of. Our team will be available to demonstrate our 6 new apps. You have to just click on the chat option or email crm@inogic.com for a first look on Kanban Board, Map My Relationships, Click2Undo, Recurring Billing Manager, Subscription Management and Auto Tax Calculator.

That’s not all!

DON’T MISS OUR PARTNER SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE

Maps for CRM: Geo-Analytics, Routes, Locational Marketing & Territory Management – Powered by Maplytics™ – , a Microsoft Certified app for Dynamics 365. 

July 3 | 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM Central European Summer Time

Maplytics™ being quite popular in the Dynamics community, has received quite love in the past few years. Its eminent features Territory Management, Optimized Routing, Appointment Planning and Radius Search are just what the users prefer over other apps. Since it is going to be an engaging session be prepared with your questions. To join this insightful session, you should be logged in and registered to the event.

So, don’t forget to register. Be our guest and let’s make this virtual event even more interesting and enriching with knowledge exchange.

Without further ado, mail us at crm@inogic.com so that we can book your spot at once!

See you soon… Virtually

Until then – Stay Safe, Stay Healthy!

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The AI community says Black Lives Matter, but more work needs to be done

June 6, 2020   Big Data
 The AI community says Black Lives Matter, but more work needs to be done

This week, as thousands of protestors marched in cities around the U.S. to bring attention to the death of George Floyd, police brutality, and abuses at the highest levels of government, members of the AI research community made their own small gestures of support. NeurIPS, one of the world’s largest AI and machine learning conferences, extended its technical paper submission deadline by 48 hours. And researchers pledged to match donations to Black in AI, a nonprofit promoting the sharing ideas, collaborations, and discussion of initiatives to increase the presence of black people in the field of AI.

“NeurIPS grieves for its Black community members devastated by the cycle of police and vigilante violence. [We] mourn … for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, and thousands of black people who have lost their lives to this violence. [And we stand] with its black community to affirm that, today and every day, black lives matter,” the NeurIPS board wrote in a statement announcing its decision.

In a separate, independent effort aimed at spurring mentors to reach out to black researchers as they finalize their NeurIPS submissions, Google Brain scientist Nicolas Le Roux and Google AI lead Jeff Dean pledged to contribute $ 1,000 to Black in AI for every person who receives assistance.

For the AI community, acknowledgment of the movement is a start, but research shows that it — much like the rest of the tech industry — continues to suffer from a lack of diversity. According to a survey published by New York University’s AI Now Institute, as of April 2019, only 2.5% of Google’s workforce was black, while Facebook and Microsoft were each at 4%. The absent representation is problematic on its face, but it also risks replicating or perpetuating historical biases and power imbalances, like image recognition services that make offensive classifications and chatbots that channel hate speech. In something of a case in point, a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study last December found that facial recognition systems misidentify black people more often than white people.

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17. Join leading AI executives: Register for the free livestream.

“Despite many decades of ‘pipeline studies’ that assess the flow of diverse job candidates from school to industry, there has been no substantial progress in diversity in the AI industry. The focus on the pipeline has not addressed deeper issues with workplace cultures, power asymmetries, harassment, exclusionary hiring practices, unfair compensation, and tokenization that are causing people to leave or avoid working in the AI sector altogether,” the AI Now Institute report concluded. “[AI] bias mirrors and replicates existing structures of inequality in the [industry and] society.”

Some solutions proposed by the AI Now Institute and others include greater transparency with respect to salaries and compensation, harassment and discrimination reports, and hiring practices. Others are calling for targeted recruitment to increase employee diversity, along with commitments to bolster the number of people of color, women, and other underrepresented groups at leadership levels of AI companies.

But it’s an uphill battle. An analysis published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year found that women and people of color in academia produce scientific novelty at higher rates than white men, but those contributions are often “devalued and discounted” in the context of hiring and promotion. And Google, one of the largest and most influential AI companies on the planet, reportedly scrapped diversity initiatives in May over concern about a conservative backlash.

As my colleague Khari Johnson recently wrote, many AI companies pay lip service to the importance of diversity. That was never acceptable, particularly considering that venture capital for AI startups reached record levels in 2018. But at this juncture, as Americans are forced to come terms with systemic racism, it seems downright inexcusable.

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Business Now Website to Inspire, Engage and Educate the NetSuite Community

April 16, 2020   NetSuite
linkedin business now%20(1) Business Now Website to Inspire, Engage and Educate the NetSuite Community

Posted by Lorna Garey, Executive Editor, Brainyard

Not much is certain right now, but one thing we know for sure is that the NetSuite community of customers, experts and partners is rich in agile, inspiring, resilient leaders. They’re generous and candid in sharing the challenges their organizations are facing now, what adaptation looks like in their worlds and how they’re positioning their businesses to come out on the other side stronger. Maybe not quite the same, or even a little bit the same. But the content team at NetSuite has a front-row seat into how being part of a community, caring for customers and employees and forging smart partnerships is paying dividends.

We decided to pull all that collected wisdom into a hub that we’re calling Business Now. The idea is to crowdsource smart strategies, advice from our editors and industry experts and some pretty darn inspirational stories, package it all together, and make it easy for you to learn and commune virtually with your peers.

Here’s what you’ll find:

Best practices, financial advice and resources gathered from around NetSuite, including this blog, the Brainyard and Grow Wire. Need to craft crisis messaging, figure out how to access new funding sources or get your employees set up to WFH
without depleting cash reserves? We’ve got all that and more.

Practical, vertical-specific guidance for business leaders in retail, restaurants & hospitality, manufacturing and nonprofits. We started here because let’s face it, these organizations are facing extraordinary challenges that hit almost overnight. What I’d say to those leaders is, you’re not in this thing alone. We’ve collected important links and advice, all of it very relevant to your reality.

Inspiration and genius ideas. Really. Remember I said you’re not in this alone? Here’s where we’ve collected those inspiring stories of resilience. What do you do if you sell eyewear but can’t exactly have customers in your store trying on frames? Or you’re in the nonprofit sector providing no-interest loans and financial advice and suddenly demand increases tenfold? You get creative, that’s what.

Events roundup: These interviews, podcasts and webinars are a labor of love for our team. We’re getting practical, like asking top financial leaders what tools and techniques help them pull off a virtual close without breaking an (obvious) sweat. But we’re also looking to inspire. Meet some amazing young performers courtesy of School of Rock, work off some of the “quarantine 15” in a Yoga Sculpt class with Fithouse or learn from a sleep expert how your bedroom environment and nighttime routine might be keeping you from sleeping soundly.

Our goal with Business Now is to save you time by bringing resources into one hub, yes, but again, we believe that personal connections and peer support are more important than they’ve ever been in our lifetimes. It’s an extraordinary time. None of us will come through unchanged.

Posted on Wed, April 15, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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How NetSuite Helps Creativity Explored Build a Stronger Community for People With Disabilities

November 26, 2019   NetSuite
ns podcast 670x446 megan hover lq 111319 How NetSuite Helps Creativity Explored Build a Stronger Community for People With Disabilities

Posted by Kendall Fisher, Executive Producer and Host of The NetSuite Podcast

Approximately one million Americans live with a developmental disability, and many of them struggle to belong, to find a sense of community or a means to be financially self-sustainable.

That’s exactly the hole Creativity Explored seeks to fulfill.

Based out of San Francisco, California—with a population of 9,000 people with disabilities—the nonprofit works with more than 130 artists who have developmental disabilities, providing space, supplies, professional instruction and exhibition opportunities to promote and sell their work. In fact, the organization gives 50% of any sale back to the artist, supporting its artists financial independence. 

On this episode of “The NetSuite Podcast,” we sat down with Creativity Explored’s Development Director, Megan Hover, to discuss the organization’s impact on the world, how it’s able to provide this opportunity for its artists and how NetSuite helps fuel its important mission.

Hover discusses the importance of building a community for these artists as well as the positive impact their work has within the art world and upon the conversation around people with disabilities. She dives into the ways in which the company raises money to continue empowering its artists, and how NetSuite’s single view into the organization’s donations, donor relationships, sales and spending allows for more efficient processes.

Hover also discusses how NetSuite’s SuiteDonation and Suite Pro-Bono programs have impacted the organization’s ability to better harness its use of NetSuite, creating better processes that are then used to make better decisions for the good of its artists. For example, she says NetSuite’s customization for tracking grant application, grant report deadlines and grant prospecting has helped Creativity Explored grow its grant funding by 300% over the past two years. 

Hover concludes by explaining why other nonprofits should consider implementing NetSuite and reveals her hopes for the future of the organization.

Tune in to listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube.

Posted on Mon, November 25, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Power BI Developer community November 2019 update

November 22, 2019   Self-Service BI

This blog post covers the latest updates for the Power BI Developer community. Don’t forget to check out our last developer blog post, if you haven’t done so already.

Here is the list of updates for this month:

Embedded analytics updates

Automation & life-cycle management

Connecting a report to datasets using dynamic binding

Clone and Rebind APIs support shared dataset

API for generating embed token for multiple items

Embed capabilities

Embedded paginated reports

Embedded AI – Decomposition tree

Automatic Page Refresh supported in Power BI Embedded

Personalize your table and matrix hyperlinks behavior

Interact with your embedded mobile report with single tap

Bootstrap your iframe to Improve rendering performance

Power BI visuals platform updates

Context menu support

Automation & life-cycle management

Connecting a report to datasets using dynamic binding

This exciting feature is mainly aimed at ISVs and developers that have many customers, each having their own workspace containing a dataset connected to a Power BI report. Instead of copying and maintaining hundreds of report duplicates, ISVs and developers can now maintain a single template of a report that can be connected to multiple datasets across workspaces. The same report displays different information, depending on the dataset it is connected to. For example, a report showing retail sale values can be connected to different retailer datasets, and produce different results, depending on the dataset of the retailer it is connected to. This is achieved by adding the wanted dataset to the embed configuration before embedding.

Learn more

DynamicBinding Power BI Developer community November 2019 update

Clone and Rebind APIs support shared datasets

Shared datasets are now supported across all embedding solutions, allowing partners and customers to manage the connections of Power BI datasets and reports across workspaces. This capability enabled us to expand the following APIs and automate related scenarios:

  • Rebind report REST API allows now to rebind a report to a dataset across workspaces, replacing the need to create and maintain many datasets and fulfilling the organizational requirement to maintain ‘one source of truth’ in a centrally managed dataset.
  • Clone report REST API allows now to copy reports across workspaces while maintaining the original connection with the dataset that resides in a different workspace (similar to Copy reports in Power BI Service).

API for generating embed token for multiple items

The new API is aimed at ISVs and developers, embedding Power BI content into applications for their customers (aka ‘App owns data’ solution). It allows to generate an embed token with permissions for multiple reports, datasets, and target workspaces. Reports and datasets do not have to be related and binding of a report to a dataset can be done during embedding (see  Connecting a report to datasets using dynamic binding).

The API for generating embed token for multiple items has many other advantages for customers, other than supporting shared dataset related automation scenarios and dynamic binding. Among these are ease of implementation and management when embedding multiple items, reports drill through scenarios, and improved performance when switching between reports.

Embed capabilities

Embedded paginated reports

As announced in our recently posted blog, the scenario of embedding paginated reports in your own application for your customers (aka ‘App owns data’ solution), is now in public preview. In addition, the scenario of embedding paginated reports into your organization’s internal apps and portals (aka ‘User owns data’ solution), is now GA.

AppWithPaginatedReport Power BI Developer community November 2019 update

Embedded AI – Decomposition tree

Decomposition tree visual was recently announced a public preview in Power BI Desktop. We are thrilled to announce that this highly requested feature is also supported in Power BI Embedded. A decomposition tree can be used to perform root-cause analysis by viewing how individual categories in a group contribute to the whole. The visual lets you decompose, or break down, a group to see its individual categories and how they can be ranked according to a selected measure, such as by sales amount.

Learn more

Automatic Page Refresh supported in Power BI Embedded

Automatic page refresh for DirectQuery was announced a public preview in the October 2019 release of Power BI Desktop. This feature is highly requested by Power BI Embedded partners and customers as well, and we are now supporting it.

When monitoring critical events with Power BI Embedded, it’s important that the data is reflected as soon as the data source gets updated. For example, in the manufacturing industry, it’s critical to know when a machine is malfunctioning. To enable this, we are following Power BI Service and releasing the automatic page refresh capability, which allows you to set the refresh interval of visuals in your report when using a DirectQuery source. For extremely fast updating sources, this near real-time experience will allow your consumers to monitor time-critical reports and ensure that they are always viewing the latest.

Automatic page refresh for reports in Power BI Embedded is configured with steps similar to the configuration in Power BI Service. Enabling the feature and setting the minimum refresh interval are the same for Power BI Embedded Azure capacities and for Power BI Premium capacities (see here).

Learn more

Personalize your table and matrix hyperlinks behavior

We have added a new user action event, ‘dataHyperlinkClicked’. Power BI supports hyperlink columns. When clicking on a hyperlink cell in a table or matrix native visuals, the URL will be loaded into a new browsing context. With ‘dataHyperlinkClicked’  event, application owners can control hyperlink cell click behavior, by setting report embed configurations to raise an event and provide their custom event handler. The event contains the selected URL, and the click source – report, page and visual.

Learn more

Interact with your embedded mobile report with single tap

This feature is supported in the Power BI mobile application since April 2019 and now we have added support for mobile embedded analytics within our partners and customers’ applications. With a single tap interaction, a visual is selected and the desired action is executed at the same time.

Bootstrap your iframe to Improve rendering performance

The new powerbi.bootstrap(element,config) allows developers to start embedding before all required parameters are available. The bootstrap API prepares and initializes the iframe. When using the bootstrap API, it is still required to call powerbi.embed(element,config) on the same HTML element. One of the use cases for this feature for example, is to run the iframe bootstrap and the back-end calls for embedding (for instance, generate embed token), in parallel. It is highly recommended to use the bootstrap API when it is possible to generate the iframe before it is visible to the end user.

Learn more

What is the context menu?

Typically users hover over data points in a visual for the right-click menu to be available. To provide a unified and smooth experience to all users using any Power BI visuals, we recommend that our developers and partners enable the context menu in their existing and new visuals’ submissions. We have also updated our guidelines for Power BI visuals.

This is a heads-up that we’ll add this new requirement to our submission process for any new visuals or any updates of existing visuals in the coming months.

How to add the context menu to your visual?

You can find the usage guide here.

For any question and help please reach out to pbicvsupport@microsoft.com

That’s all for this post. We hope you found it useful. Please continue to send us your feedback – it’s very important for us! Have an amazing feature in mind? Please share it or vote in our Power BI Embedded Analytics Ideas forum, or our Custom Visuals Ideas forum.

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Exclusive LIVE Community Event #2 – Ask Amir Anything

November 12, 2019   Self-Service BI

Next up in our Triple A Live Event Series:

Have you ever wanted the chance to ask Technical Fellow Amir Netz questions about the latest updates, features and future?   Now’s your chance! On November 20th, 2019 at 12 PM Pacific Time, we’ll be hosting another exclusive, invitation only, live event.

Head on over to the Power BI community to find out how you can get a chance to join: https://aka.ms/PBICommEvents

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Win Power BI Swag with Community Kudopalooza!

October 19, 2019   Self-Service BI

This week, we are announcing our Power BI Kudopalooza community event. As part of the event, community members can complete activities and be entered in drawings for cool Power BI Swag each week.

The Power BI Community is where you can see cool examples of how people are using Power BI, connect with others and have your questions answered.

Want to know more? Head on over to the Power BI community forums to find out how to participate and – Enter to WIN SWAG!

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University Book Store Goes Back to School, Upgrading Ecommerce, POS, Back-Office Solutions to Better Serve UW Students and Community

September 26, 2019   NetSuite
180824 1719%20(1) University Book Store Goes Back to School, Upgrading Ecommerce, POS, Back Office Solutions to Better Serve UW Students and Community

Posted by Ian McCue, Content Manager

As the name indicates, University Book Store is a campus bookstore, but it’s much more than that. The independent bookstore for the University of Washington sells not only the standard lineup of textbooks, school supplies and Husky apparel, but also trade books that would be found at any local bookstore, non-school-themed apparel, technology and cosmetics.

University Book Store serves not just students, faculty and staff, but the local community as well, with five stores sprinkled throughout Seattle and the Puget Sound area. Its flagship store is located just off-campus in Seattle’s U District. That 100,000-square-foot store on “The Ave” accounts for about 85% of the retailer’s sales.

“I’d say we’re more like a Macy’s or Nordstrom than we are a Barnes & Noble, just because we have so many different departments,” University Book Store CIO Erin Olinick said. “We’re really known as being the one-stop campus shop.”

The Book Store sells textbooks for not only the University of Washington’s main campus but UW’s Tacoma and Bothell locations, two other nearby colleges and 14 private high schools.

Struggling with Omnichannel Demands

While University Book Store’s business model is unique, it faces the same challenges as just about any retailer. Its customers’ expectations are higher than ever before as they demand a combination of convenience, speed and highly competitive prices. Meeting those expectations is imperative as the Book Store faces intense competition from Amazon, book publishers selling direct to students and other online shops.

University Book Store did its best to adapt to a rapidly changing retail landscape, but a legacy RATEX solution was an unavoidable roadblock. The 35-year-old system, built on Linux and locally hosted, managed accounting, point-of-sale and inventory. Employees had to decipher the RATEX system’s black-and-white, MS DOS-like user interface (you’re forgiven if you’re unfamiliar with all of that; suffice to say, the technology was archaic). Only one employee knew how to code the system and became the gatekeeper for any software modifications.

Additionally, University Book Store’s homegrown ecommerce solution involved a complex layering of servers that received point-of-sale and inventory information through an API that updated every 24 hours. The result was often inaccurate inventory data that frustrated shoppers and staff.

“The system was absolutely impeding our ability to move forward and remain relevant in a really quickly moving and competitive industry,” Olinick said.

Moving Beyond Industry Solutions

After the Book Store determined it needed to overhaul its technology stack, it first turned to long-standing industry solutions from MBS Textbook Exchange, Nebraska Book Co. and Visual RATEX (a newer version of its current system).

It was not until Olinick’s team heard about The Duck Store at the University of Oregon using NetSuite that it considered the cloud-based, unified business management platform. University Book Store eventually chose NetSuite over Visual RATEX because it could provide a unified source of data from across the company that could help break down departmental siloes and improve communication.

“We really felt that NetSuite had the potential to push us to evolve and think in a much broader way,” Olinick said. “It really made us uncomfortable in a lot of ways, but that was something that we actually embraced, because we firmly believed that NetSuite would finally allow us to compete with other retailers, and our competition is not other bookstores, it’s other retailers.”

The versatile solution could support every aspect of the business, including ecommerce, point-of-sale, email marketing and back-end operations like financials, inventory management, order management and fulfillment.

Creating a Better Customer Experience 

When customers visit the retailer’s online store, they can now add textbooks, clothing and headphones, for example, to a single cart instead of checking out multiple times for different departments. That streamlined process has helped increase order size and allows the company to cross-sell by taking advantage of product recommendations.

Today, shoppers can pick up their online orders in any University Book Store location same-day or pay for express shipping and preorder products before the store even receives them. Students can also sign up for a textbook rental account on the ecommerce site.

In-store, students can pay with their school-issued Husky Card. If a textbook is out-of-stock, the store can offer students an e-book version immediately instead of potentially losing the sale like in the past. About 12% of the retailer’s course materials revenue now comes from digital products like e-books and access codes, up from 3% with the old system. 

Internally, NetSuite ERP provides a single source of data with automated reports on every aspect of the business, a vast improvement over manual reports in spreadsheets that required data entry. For example, it’s now easy for the Book Store to see the profitability of items or track expenses by location or department instead of trying to dig up high-level information in a massive spreadsheet. On the vendor side, it can view credit balances by supplier and outstanding checks to better manage cash flow. Those insights help the retailer make informed decisions about pricing and promotions.

 Access to more detailed customer data, including where they shop and how much they spend, allows the store to send more personalized emails to various customer segments through the Bronto marketing platform. That’s led to a big bump in the ROI of University Book Store’s email campaigns.

Additionally, the Book Store can look at how many customers are purchasing digital copies of textbooks to reduce procurement of physical copies. That has lowered both shipping and handling costs and inventory carrying expenses.

But those quantitative benefits are second to the increased collaboration and employee empowerment provided by a system that everyone can access.

“My favorite thing about NetSuite is that my staff has really kind of become their own business owners, job owners,” said Matt Schleede, course materials manager. “They all have responsibilities on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and they’ve been able to run their own reports and kind of relearn how to do their jobs in a way that makes themselves more efficient. When they’re working to their best of their abilities … it makes the business more efficient.”

University Book Store continues to recognize new gains as it takes advantage of more aspects of the platform’s capabilities. It sees this as only the beginning of a long journey.

The nearly 120-year-old company is ready for the future and the ever-changing expectations of its customers with a solution that has the flexibility and backing to evolve with it.

“It’s pretty amazing to know our systems and processes are not stuck in one place anymore,” Olinick said. “The collaborative environment we now have with staff asking each other questions is helping us to crack open the areas of our business that we didn’t have visibility into before, because things were so automated and so hidden in our old system that we weren’t able to make changes to them.”

Learn more about NetSuite’s software for campus bookstores.

Posted on Wed, September 25, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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