As a wholesale distribution company, you’re smack dab in the middle of the supply chain. Current circumstances are making distribution complicated. You have a lot of boxes to check – sales goals to meet, orders to fulfill, but do you have enough inventory?
You could be facing a number of challenges that are holding you back from reaching your goals:
- Manual processes are delaying inventory management, order turnaround times, returns, and even customer service. You don’t have a team to meet all these demands, only Microsoft Excel™ spreadsheet software.
- Without automatic order notifications, shipping windows are being missed.
- Your customer service team is spending hours on the phone with couriers to retrieve shipping labels, keeping them distracted from all the other customer issues.
- Billing is flawed. Customers are being charged late or not at all – meaning they are way less likely to pay when they do receive the bill.
- Money is coming in late, severely impacting your ability to purchase new inventory. No new inventory means you’re back to not being able to fulfill orders.
All the manual processes are causing a constant traffic jam in your business – taking the focus away from your long-term strategy.
How can you focus on your business goals despite these challenges?
Your company isn’t the first – and won’t be the last – to reap the powerful benefits of a NetSuite ERP system for wholesale distribution. In all our years of experience, we have worked with hundreds of businesses in the same situation. And they all ended up coming out ahead.
NetSuite for Wholesale Distribution: 4 Ways to Overcome Your Distribution Struggles
1. Automate your processes to improve order efficiency.
There is a lot involved in the order process. Your team is writing orders and delivering them to the warehouse. Then the order is filled. If it’s fulfilled on time, the billing department receives the paperwork to bill the customer.
All of this is time-consuming. Turnaround times are not meeting customer demands and prompt billing isn’t happening.
Think about all the time and money you could save if those processes were automated. Gone are the days having to fill out order forms on paper. NetSuite can import order information and automate your invoicing, meaning less headaches for you.
Get this set up, and your data can be easily accessible all in one place to be routed to the correct warehouses digitally. Billing can happen right when the order is complete, helping cash continue to flow.
You’ll worry less about the quality of your orders when you can track it right at your fingertips with an ERP built specifically for wholesale distribution.
2. Fill larger orders with ease.
COVID-19 caused a need for businesses to shift to direct-to-consumer (DTC). You’ve probably felt the pressure of this shift in your distribution processes. While the shift to DTC may not feel comfortable, there is a huge benefit of you selling this way – meeting your customers where they feel comfortable.
You may have a team on the sidelines ready to take on new DTC orders, but you still have B2B customers to satisfy. Imagine a process where orders could be automatically directed to the correct place, without extra manpower. You would be able to fulfill more orders with less paperwork.
Within NetSuite, orders can be segmented and routed to the correct place within a single system. You can separate your warehouses so they can focus more on the task at hand, instead of worrying about where orders are and how they’ll get done in time.
3. Spend less time on returns.
Returns can be a hassle for your customer service team when they are spending hours on the phone trying to get the right return labels. Customers want returns quickly, but you can only do so much.
What if there was a self-service portal that customers could log into and easily retrieve their return labels, stick it on their package, and drop it off at the nearest courier?
Think about it. Your customer service team could have the bandwidth to create a more personalized experience with your customers – making sure they’re delighted.
Couldn’t that make your life so much easier? With the best ERP system for wholesale distribution, it’s possible.
4. Build more trusting relationships with your customers and vendors.
In the wholesale distribution world, one of the only ways to differentiate yourself is to have strong relationships with your customers and vendors. You may not own your own products, but you can stand out by providing top-notch service to everyone you come in contact with.
Within your NetSuite wholesale distribution ERP, you can easily track all of your relationships and enhance how each individual’s needs are met. Your customer data can be available to you at the touch of a button – meaning you can spend more time getting to know them.
During these times, customers crave human connection. You can be first in line to provide it.
Focus less on manual processes, and more on reaching your goals with an ERP built for wholesale distribution.
We understand that making a leap from your comfort zone can seem impossible. But after helping hundreds of businesses like yours, it’s clear that operating manually is no longer an option, especially in the current distribution climate.
Make a plan this week to apply these four opportunities to automate your processes and watch how quickly you could reach your business goals.