axis vMerchant B2B Management Reporting
Return to axis vMerchant B2B Facilities
You can provide your clients with a complete suite of reports that they can run for themselves to analyse their own spending patterns.
This is particularly well-suited to those in the consumables, stationery and facilities management arenas, where your customer's purchasing sits outside of their normal purchasing channel and managers need to keep track of what their employees and/or branches are buying.
For example, you may supply stationery items to a chain of shops where each shop manager is allowed to purchase incidental stationery items from your website but the purchasing manager at head office wants to keep an overall eye on who is buying what - they may, for instance, be happy to see that the stock of pens and paper is being replenished but unhappy if one of the managers buys a new chair for themselves!
The Management Reporting option can be simply added to the list of options available on the "My Account" section of a B2B site:
In most cases, this would only appear as an option for the main Purchasing Manager (the "eBusiness Main Contact" within the axis diplomat Customer Account) and/or only for a contact that is allowed to see account information.
Selecting this option would take the Purchasing Manager to a page that allows a variety of selection options to be made:
They can specify a date range for the report, limit it to certain Product Categories (i.e. your top-level eBusiness groups) and restrict the reported data to purchases by specific users. They can also choose to have the information displayed as a report or a chart.
They can select a report that is broken down by month, product category, user or individual products. In the case of a head office user, the report can also be categorised by branch.
For example, here is a report broken down by month for the last six months of 2012:
The user is then able to drill-down into the report, for example, seeing that the spending for September is abnormally high, they could click on "September 2012" in the above report and immediately spot the annomaly - someone has ordered 800 rulers!
They could then click on Order Number 6547 and see who placed the order.
Reports can also be sub-divided; for example, the same report could be sub-divided by Product Category:
If the user decides that this is a report that they will run on a regular basis (albeit with different dates - dates are not stored as part of a template) then they can save this as a template:
In future, they can run this report by selecting from a list of active templates:
The Management Reporting facilities can be made available on websites powered by any axis diplomat system with the eProcurement module and is just one of the tools to help you provide your customers with more functionality and flexibility through your B2B website - aiding customer retention and increasing spend.
For an existing axis vMerchant website, powered by an axis diplomat system which already includes the eProcurement module, adding Management Reporting is simply a case of styling the web pages to match the existing design. This typically involves around 4 hours of web development time.