Is your Wholesale Distribution Company coming up against barriers to growth? Are your plans for success stalling? Don’t worry. In a few simple steps you can identify the blockages that are holding your wholesale company back and start to move forward again. Try these five moves.
- Look at your goals
As a wholesale and distribution business you want to give your customers the very best. That means standing out from the competition on quality of service as well as price. This will help you to grow your customer base.
To do that you need to find the best way to purchase from your suppliers, increase workforce productivity and make your wholesale business more efficient in everything you do.
Overall you want to find a way to increase your profits while laying the foundation for sustainable growth.
- How are you going to get there?
Take a look at your current business systems – are you running outdated software? For example, are you still using spreadsheets?
In order to ramp up to the next stage of growth you need to be able to manage increasing volumes of information as you add new products to your portfolio and even new countries to your distribution network. This will bring fresh challenges to your wholesale business, such as; more complex compliance, foreign laws, different currencies and regulations.
Is your existing software infrastructure up to that task?
- Overcoming barriers to success
Do any of these apply to you?
- Can’t run sales and marketing campaigns effectively
– Slower-than-required growth in pipeline and customers
- Ability to forecast is poor, as is visibility into supply
– Poor supply–demand matching
- Reliance on manual processes, leading to process inefficiencies:
– Shipment delays
– Long lag times in closing books
– Reduced workforce productivity
– Error-prone inventory and warehouse management
– Slow procurement processes
If so then you could seriously benefit from a more up to date, integrated approach to running your business.
- Get connected
Getting the warehouse system talking to the sale order system and having integrated e-commerce linked to your back-end business processes will allow you to deliver to your customer on-time. This way you avoid the niggles that lose you business and hand your competitors the edge.
Inefficient processes and inadequate software cause more problems than any of us would like to admit. But by talking to professionals who know your business you can get back on track.
- Try Business ByDesign from SAP
We recommend that wholesale distribution companies try SAP Business ByDesign which not only smoothes out your processes and gets each element working together, it also has industry-leading analytics so you can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and trends, including:
- Marketing and sales pipeline
- Inventory positions
- Procurement spend
- Delivery dates
- Shipment performance
- Financial metrics
All this is available on a low-monthly per user subscription fee. Our experts would be really happy to talk to you and give you a demonstration of how it can work for you. Contact us here.
