Leading digital technologies and services distributor Axiz is building out its digital platform to give partners comprehensive and advanced digital services, where they can transact and manage their businesses more effectively.
Tondani Mphephu, technical business development manager at Axiz, says the Axiz Digital Platform – a first of its kind for channel partners in South Africa – is making business slicker, more intelligent and faster for vendors, partners and their end customers. The platform first launched with a Microsoft vendor integration three years ago and has expanded to support over five partial to full vendor integrations.
It benefits all Axiz channel and managed partners, with thousands of partners logging into the system and transacting monthly. The platform enables partners and their end customers to transact in a unique marketplace across various products, services, vendors, geolocations and levels of complexity on a single pane of glass.
The system gives partners up-to-date information on multi-vendor products, with descriptions, images, pricing and real-time stock levels. It allows them to consume hardware and software in a single shopping basket and offers open API integrations for partners and their end customers. “The customer interface allows partners to white label our digital platform for their customers,” he says.
Mphephu says: “We realised some years ago that all stakeholders in our ecosystem were struggling with the same problem – no one platform could do it all.”
He says distribution systems’ fundamental business problems are that they are traditionally rigid and complex, lacking new-age advancements to make them interactive and yield real-time results. These challenges can result in slow responses to customers and inaccurate stock management.
Discrepancies between multiple systems and manually tracked inventory can cause laborious and inefficient stock management. Traditional, manual procedures for sourcing data can slow down the speed to market and decrease work productivity. While large data is gathered using disparate data sources across the business, the manual processes cannot measure and deliver a valuable business insight timeously.
With a vendor-integrated digital platform, for example, the Axiz HPE iQuote or Cisco CCW market, the bill of material configuration and quoting processes become quick and accurate, including pre-approved discounts and promotional prices, and minimises channel pre-sales support requirements. The Axiz Digital Platform enables partners to locate products faster, reduce travel time and operational costs, improve customer service and grow the business.
“We wanted to end complexity, reduce transactional processing time, and absorb much of the work required in a many-to-many engagement. So we looked at the market, trying to find a system, platform, or integrator that could provide all these capabilities. Ultimately, we opted to build our own platform for all the capabilities, processes and workflows our partners and their end-customers needed to improve efficiencies and scale their businesses.”
“By using microservices, APIs and our innovative approach, we have re-engineered and redesigned how the business works. This is digital transformation in action – addressing a business problem with a digital solution. With our AXIZ Digital Platform, we are shifting partners from being order takers to people who are driving business digitally, building campaigns and building relationships with customers,” Mphephu says. “The platform absorbs the complexity of transacting with us as a distributor and reduces the friction of back-and-forth emails. Partners benefit from new revenue streams and reduced friction between the transactional system and the people.”
Mphephu says Axiz continually drives an improved stakeholder value proposition for vendors and partners. “We’re providing insight and value for the channel with ongoing feature releases and updates in a secure, controllable and auditable platform. One of our key objectives with the platform is to deliver digital services rapidly, not only to make our business smarter but also to enable vendors, partners and their end customers,” he says.
“The Axiz Digital Services value proposition has transformed channel engagement and illustrates the value of digital transformation,” he says.
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