Kelly Stafford, Regional Account Manager at Merlin ERP, shares how AI is helping builders’ merchants who are short on time and long on jobs.
In most merchant businesses, one person wears several hats. The person doing the buying is often the same one chasing an overdue account, before covering the counter when it gets busy.
Time is the thing you never have enough of, and a surprising amount of it goes on one thing: getting information in and out of your systems.
Which customers have gone quiet? Which lines are sitting on a thin margin?
It’s all information stored in your ERP but historically, getting it out has meant building a report (or waiting on someone else to do so…) and by then, the moment for answers has passed.
This is the job AI is built for. With AI, you don’t operate the software so much as talk to it: ask a question in plain words, the way you’d ask anyone on your team, and AI finds the answer.
For Merlin ERP customers, this functionality is already here. Merlin now runs on AppCentral, Aptean’s AI platform for merchants. It’s the same fully integrated ERP you know, handling everything from order entry through to delivery across your supply chain, but now with AI built in.
Nothing you rely on changes. You can just ask it to deliver the critical information you need.
“Across a week, these rapid, smart insights hand back hours that can go into winning new business, negotiating with suppliers, or nurturing customer relationships.”
Business insights without building reports
Bringing Merlin ERP into AppCentral has given our customers a faster way to access the insights they already capture. They can query which accounts have slipped off the radar and instantly generate a call list to chase up. Or they can flag which lines are selling under a 15% margin and sort the pricing before the next order goes out.
With AppCentral, you can type a sentence in everyday language. “Give me a list of my top ten customers by sales volume,” or “show me products I haven’t sold in 30 days.”
Instead of the afternoon disappearing into pulling that information together, you’re focused on what happens next — who to call, which prices to update, what products to restock.
Your priority is the response, not the legwork that used to come before it.
AI is changing the quality of customer interactions, too. When a customer is on the phone placing an order, you can call up not only what they’ve bought before, but what they’ve stopped buying. “You’ve not had any of those screws since March — want me to add a box…?”
It is an effortless sale, while the call is live.
Catch problems before looking for them
AI doesn’t only answer the questions you put to it; you can set it to keep track of things for you. It can flag a usually reliable customer whose orders have been tailing off for months, or a product that’s started selling below margin since a supplier put their price up.
Trends and insights that are easy to miss when you’re working flat out.
It’s like having someone keep half an eye on your business while you get on with everything else. You don’t have to go looking for problems anymore — they come to you, early enough to do something about them.
It can also go a step further and act on alerts. Say a price rise comes in from a supplier but your website is still selling at the old margin. The system can catch it and put it right before the orders come in overnight, rather than leaving you to find out once the sales have already been made.
Most ERPs can’t do this yet…
For now, very few merchants have AI built into their ERP. Most are still a step behind their own information. In contrast, Merlin customers are asking the system a question over their morning coffee — and getting the answer before their cup is empty.
Across a week, these rapid, smart insights hand back hours that can go into winning new business, negotiating with suppliers, or nurturing customer relationships. Those are the jobs that grow your business, and the time to do them is exactly what your competitors haven’t got yet.
Click here to find out more about the benefits of Merlin’s AI-enabled merchant ERP.
Click here to book a Merlin ERP demo.
