Wholesale distributors often stock and sell thousands of inventory items. These items may be similar, with only slight variations in size, style, or other attributes for each family of products. But your customers don’t care about the other items, they work with you to get the items they need.
Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy, edit and paste… Only to find out… something is wrong. Guess who's in for a long night? All too often, business leaders come to us with this challenge. After taking all the right steps—offering a great product/service, hiring the right people, and providing ample pay, benefits, and perks—they realize that something is amiss.
Remember when working from home was a luxury? Remember when salespeople could simply drop by on a Friday afternoon to update the CRM? Remember when you could survive on an occasional email about the status of a facility? Business no longer works like that. In fact, it hasn’t worked like that for years.
Though it may still be two months away and you still have a lot to get through before the end of the year—HR departments still have to lead employees through insurance enrollment, retail companies and their value chain partners need to handle holiday rushes, and many still are yet to file PPP loan forgiveness—the year-end close is rapidly approaching.
Today’s distribution firms have spent the year facing immense challenges just to keep the lights on. An unexpected revenue drop, staffing challenges, and international supply chain disruption have all come as a result of recent lockdowns, and the path to recovery might still look slower than one may hope. But recovery is coming, and it’s going to be important to keep your business focused on whatever is next.
So many ERP options, so many moving parts in each product, and so much flexibility in configuration, many organizations seeking out cloud ERP software suffer from paralysis by analysis. This is only made harder when each vendor seems to have an endless cavalcade of partners who can put the solution into use. Too often, companies will get almost everything they need from a product—only to find out that their partner can’t put it into action. With timeframes measured in years or decades, ERP is all about getting long-term value from a solution.
The distribution landscape is in a constant state of change. Whether it’s the changes you’ve had to make to remain competitive in the past few years or the changes you’ve needed to make to survive 2020, your company has been consistently on the move as it worked to fend off challenges to business model, operating process, or margins.
2020 has been an intriguing year. For many, this meant challenges. For some—especially in industries serving the medical community—this meant unforeseen opportunities. For all, this meant that some kind of change was in order. Understandably, most organizations—especially those forced to lay off workers, reforecast revenue, and do whatever was needed to survive the lockdowns—are looking to put this year into the rearview.
In distribution, the product is a key part of your business. Though many distributors in recent years have looked toward partnership and value-added services as they look to fight off low-cost entrants, your business still relies on the same “product in, product out” model that it always has.
Technology, in a larger sense, is a relatively ambiguous term. Not only could it be dismissed as jargon (it has the newest technology) or used as a filler word to sound innovative, it doesn’t discuss what is going on with a product.