If you are managing a small distribution business, you need to give top priority to your spending. It’s important your business is able to manage the cost of your warehouse operations in order to post profits at the end of the month. Accomplishing this is no mean feat although there are software solutions that can help you to make the process a whole lot simpler. These solutions help you to monitor and improve important details about the business and its inventory flow.
The most ideal way for a small distribution business to remain competitive is have a basic understanding and grasp of its stock. This involves keeping track of the numbers of products in, the quantity out and the excesses. For you to remain competitive you need to ensure that your prices are kept at a minimum in order to attract a lot of customers. This is usually difficult to keep track of and requires that you have a record of all the products and their price history without the help of a software solution.
The trick is being able to handle the line between excessive and just adequate. If your business owns too little product, you might fight it difficult to handle the demands; and if you have excess you might throw money at an alarming rate! Making use of a software solution for distribution, you would be able to make use of data from competitors, consumers and local markets to always remain a step ahead of the game.
There are several types of software solutions for small distribution businesses — they are usually termed “warehouse distribution software”. This refers to different software applications that include supplier relationship management (SRM), warehouse management software (WMS), customer relationship management (CRM) and product lifecycle management (PLM).
In this article, we will be looking at software solutions that help to handle different aspects of a small distribution business. Every distribution business has different needs, they don’t have the same priorities and goals. The software solution that could be deployed to a business might not be required by another business. As such it is really important that you identify the essential features that are important in your business and adopt a software solution that handles your needs.
Product Inventory
Inventory management is a complex process. At every point in time a business owner wants to know how much items he has in stock. As such inventory systems should be able to provide real-time data on stock levels, thereby providing management with the ability to make demands as appropriate.
An ideal software to handle inventory management and distribution would be EMERGE App. It’s a web-based application that helps to manage product inventory for your business. And to keep track of all important parts of the business, from product inventory to sales channels with multi-currency support and integration with external accounting software. It gives you the opportunity to manage your entire business operations.
Reporting and Insights
One of the most important and essential benefits to resource planning and management is being able to gather data from various sources (usually core areas of the business) and pull them together to make meaningful decisions. This leads to presenting a variety of reports that provide insights into different aspects of the business from production to delivery.
There are various software applications that are can handle reporting, EMERGE App also has reporting features that help you to keep tabs on reporting and provide business insights. The end result of this reporting is a series of data that show you the inner workings of the entire business and not just the warehouse alone.
Now, you can see why it is absolutely important for you to pay attention to the demands of your business when deciding on the software solution to adopt. The difficult task is usually deciding which software. To streamline this process, here is a list of top software solutions that could help your small distribution business. It should be stated here that their prices differ and they also have different functions and features:
- Oracle
- SAP
- EMERGE App
- INFOR
- Microsoft Dynamics AX
- EPICOR
- Sage ERP X3
The best approach to adopt when picking the right software solution that would be suitable for your business is to ensure you select a system tailored to meet the essential needs of your business. This is a lot more convenient than changing your business process to keep up with the technology. Examine where the loopholes might be in your distribution business and find the ideal product that provides solutions in these areas.
Top software solutions provide integration for other specialized software applications. For example, EMERGE App allows you to integrate other accounting packages like Xero into its application allowing several aspects of your business to collaborate together.
