Achieving operational excellence for wholesale distribution businesses can be challenging.
Operationally excellent distributors are using ERP to tackle disintermediation in their industries by setting up business strategies that allow them to be more effective, consistent, and react quicker to disruption.
Understanding the flow of value to customers is the key to achieving operational excellence
Being stuck in the middle of the supply chain between manufacturers and commercial customers, wholesale distributors have seen margins erode due to changing market conditions and the targeted reduction intermediaries from both ends of the supply chain.
Mapping the flow of value via customer experience is what many distributors are doing to improve operating profits.
Key benefits of utilising ERP to reach operational excellence
Reduce your operating costs by minimising errors in quoting, fulfilment, and operations
Improve sales forecasting accuracy with product configurator and available to promise
Increase working capital efficiency with demand planning and supply chain management
Klugo Solution Map for Wholesale Distribution
Klugo’s end-to-end solution supports wholesale distributors to increase margins whilst lowering costs and freeing resources to offer a high-quality service. By achieving operational excellence, you can offer a flow of value to your customers at both ends of the ever-changing supply chain.
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution like NetSuite for wholesale distribution measurably improves your operating performance giving you an advantage in a crowded marketplace. With one system, you can manage your entire customer journey, improve your decision-making, and grow your business.
Enterprise Resource Planning
With distribution ERP software you can manage logistics operations as well as front- and back-office activities. Determine product demand and ensure that you deliver on time. Control all your inventory, warehousing, and logistics in one place.
Report product level gross margin contribution in your financial reports. Manage your business with financial, operational and customer metrics on one page.
Track and correlate integrated operational business intelligence key performance indicators like inventory turn, shrinkage, working capital, day sales outstanding (DSO) and returns.
From quote to fulfilment with integrated freight. Supports 3PL and multi address shipping from.
Project management and accounting for installations. Job and service contracts profitability.
Purchasing and supplier performance reporting. Demand planning with sales order and promotional campaign forecast.
Directed put away, wave and batch picking. Serial and lot tracking. Multi-location hierarchical distribution replenishment.
By implementing ERP technology, distributors seeking to be operationally excellent can take a data-driven look at their processes and identify bottlenecks and redundant activities, maximising inventory turns and Gross Margin Return on Inventory Investment (GMROI).
Customer Relationship Management
CRM provides distributors with layers of technology automating sales processes from the back-office to on-site, integrating all systems for decision–support through the complete customer experience. NetSuite offers a multi-channel sales engine that can provide a fully operational level of engagement and cost–to–service for all clients, from the more impromptu to the high touch large customers.
Sales conversion tracking from quote to cash. Multiple price levels, product group price and volume discounts.
Supports complex multistage sales cycles with projected and weighted pipeline sales forecasting.
Manufacturing Execution System
NetSuite MES module helps distributors to simplify the order process and provide a seamless customer experience. Manage complex orders with a multi-level bill of materials and automate sales processes that directly integrate freight bookings and costs.
Work order management with multi-level bill of materials and costing.
Operationally excellent distributors shift the inventory business model toward proactive management of their inventory, motivating staff to reduce costs and provide superior customer service.
Field Service Management
Real-time data adds clarity to both short-term forecasting and long-term strategising, enabling wholesale distributors, as well as their sales reps, to always stay on top of market demand. NextService FSM technology ensures that live information flows to support data-driven decitions in the field and in the office.
Service request and programmed maintenance scheduling for technicians, crews, or sun-contractors.
Mobile device job management, checklist, and dynamic forms. Timesheet, expenses, quotes, and sales from the field.
Lifecycle management with planned servicing and repairs. Perfect repeated maintenance tasks and workflows.Owned and third-party custom asset definitions form servicing, repairs, and maintenance.
Configure Price Quote
A Salesforce survey stated that in 2020, 75% of B2B buyers expected to receive a personalised experience from their wholesale suppliers and that this experience included dynamic delivery with real-time automation. CPQ systems can help automate complex work order management.
Eliminate BOM templates. Eliminate and build work orders and routes from options selected in the product configurator.
Guided sales quote generation for configuring products with options, conditional selections and pricing.
