In wholesale distribution, you need to keep a vigilant eye on all the moving parts of the supply chain. Whether it’s optimizing product inventory, streamlining purchasing, or managing multiple business locations, cloud financial management software can give you complete visibility into real-time performance, automate complex processes, and easily adapt to the unique requirements of your wholesale distribution company.
Specifically, you need the cloud to:
- Improve supply chain efficiency. The cloud improves visibility across your supply chain to ensure accountability for all stakeholders—from suppliers to customers. Now it’s easier to understand all aspects of your inventory, product profitability, order to cash, and warehouse operations, so you can pick, pack, and ship orders more efficiently.
- Help optimize inventory levels. Inventory management is a constant balancing act to match demand to stock levels—and getting it wrong can be disastrous—leading to lost sales, too much cash tied up in excess inventory, and damaged customer relationships. The right cloud software helps you manage inventory across multiple locations and warehouses while using replenishment processes to automate reorder policies by inventory levels and even the time of year.
- Assist with intelligent pricing strategies. Getting the price right is essential for wholesale distributors who operate in the middle of the supply chain and are influenced by both manufacturing and retail pricing strategies. That’s why knowing your true cost of goods—i.e. the value of your inventory—is so important. Cloud software helps by calculating value based on your business requirements and capture added costs such as shipping, duty fees, and other landed costs, so you can get to a true cost of goods.
- Aid in effective collaboration. Departmental silos hinder both collaboration and productivity—highly detrimental to wholesale distributors who rely on continual communication and teamwork across the supply chain. The cloud demolishes silos, uniting disparate data and people, so you can work as an efficient and united team and streamline key operational processes.
- Provide real-time business intelligence. The ability to analyze all aspects of your business, including inventory, past purchases, quotes, promotions, seasonal fluctuations, etc., will help better inform your strategies to reduce costs, identify opportunities to gain customers, and grow profitably. Visibility can be as basic as a manager in one location looking for a product to fulfill an order and being able to immediately know where it is. And it can be as complex as uncovering real-time performance metrics. Either way, true visibility empowers all stakeholders, including suppliers, customers, and your sales force to make sound business decisions based on solid, accurate information.
The complexity of wholesaling presents major business challenges such as huge product inventories, narrow margins, diverse downstream customer requirements, long lead times, and unpredictable supply. Legacy systems simply can’t do the job anymore. Let the professionals at ACI Consulting show you why the cloud is a better choice for your business.
