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.
Is Item Management Making Your Job Easier or Harder?
But to offer your clients a competitive price, fast shipping, and accurate orders, you can’t find yourself bogged down in details and manual processes. Part of any good distribution solution, item management makes it easy to add or create items, tag different ones with attributes, and handle any complexity or variance in product—no matter how many locations items are spread across.
But not every item management solution is the same. Some make your job easier—helping you to rapidly add and manage similar items. Others leave you repeating processes over and over and over again. Some help you to increase accuracy, while others expose you to human error.
From control over similar items with matrix items to improved traceability over serial and lot numbers, expiration dates, the right solution makes everything run more smoothly.
Three Ways Item Management Software Can Make Life Easier
Whether you’ve been relying on spreadsheets or have been pushing your distribution management product well beyond its useful life, the journey to a new solution might leave you feeling overwhelmed. However, with a practical approach and a list of needs, you can navigate the pitfalls and find the right partner to set your firm up for success.
Item management is one of those processes you’ll need to consider. For those looking to reduce the strain on employees, eliminate manual and error-prone processes, and ensure purchasing and sales isn’t relying on bad information, a recent eBook from Acumaatica explored the benefits and functionality of a well-provisioned item management software.
We hope this offers a framework for evaluation and helps you ask pointed questions on your journey. So, what should you look for?
1) From Item Families to Accurate Attributes: Matrix Items
Creating and managing product families of like items can be difficult, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Items may look the same, causing confusion. Confusion is bad enough, but when you accidentally order or sell a customer a wrong item due to the confusion? It becomes a drag.
This is where a distribution system with matrix items makes life easier. With matrix items, you start with a master SKU or template. Simple enough. But this is where the value shines. By having the configurations available to you, this makes it easy to:
Create Items: Generate inventory items in seconds using multiple attributes. With templates, you can expedite the item creation process and provide default values for order fulfillment, purchasing, stocking, and general ledger settings.
Find and Manage Items: Now, with multiple items created, find them with ease. Filter and sort functionality helps you find and easily adjust prices.
Make Purchasing and Sales Accurate: Matrix items provide table and matrix views to streamline purchasing and sales. Facilitate both sides of the transaction by making it easy to find the item by selecting each attribute.
Connect to eCommerce: With tight integration between item management and your ecommerce storefront, this not only helps you, it helps your customers.
2) Simplify the Complex with Kitting and Disassembly
Many distributors manage kits of components assembled, stocked, and sold together. If you’ve ever received an Ikea table with one screw missing, you know exactly how annoying it is when kitting goes wrong. The same is true for your business.
If you need to disassemble a kit to fulfill another order, you better not let the partial kit end up in your customer’s hands. Lost items mean hassles, and hassles mean lost business in the future.
3) Compliance and Recall Readiness with Serial and Lot Tracking
Distributors of technology products, machinery, and automotive parts require serial tracking to manage inventory effectively.
On the other hand, lot tracking is a must-have for distributors of food products, chemicals, medical supplies, metal products, pharmaceuticals, and other non-durable goods. Lot tracking improves compliance with industry and customer quality requirements.
But without a solution that can make this easy, a recall or customer complaint might leave you scrambling. Whatever your focus, improve customer experience with Acumatica serial and lot tracking. Built to provide accuracy, quality, and compliance, this solution makes it easy to see attributes for lot and serialized inventory.
Simplifying the Complex: Cloud 9 ERP Solutions
Too often, distributors fail to notice they have a problem until they’ve become sick of scrambling to fix an order. In fact, many do not realize they have problems, and few realize there are applications like Acumatica Distribution that can help. Acumatica makes variable and complex item management easier with matrix items, kitting and disassembly, lot and serial traceability, flexible unit of measure conversions, and expiration dates.
ERP is complicated, but thanks to the cloud, implementing a solution is less risky than ever. These products are built to be flexible, future-proof, and easily configured, allowing you to capture more value than ever from an implementation project.
There are many ways that ERP can make your life easier, but without the right team on your side, it might If you need a business management solution that can deliver for the unique challenges of the wholesale distribution industry, you need a partner with the experience and expertise to get you there.
At Cloud 9 ERP Solutions, a Gold Certified Acumatica Partner, we have worked with companies like yours to configure and deliver Acumatica Cloud ERP, a product ready and able to handle your challenges.
Get to know more about how we work, who we’ve helped, and why we’ve been a leader in the business for nearly three decades by contacting us for a free consultation or watch our Acumatica Distribution demo.
Additional Distribution Resources
Pivoting Toward Recovery: Combining Inventory Optimization and AP
How RESTful APIs Provide Peace of Mind for Transforming Distributors
Why You Need a Truly Connected Warehouse Management Solution
