Wholesaler Business Processes

Enhancing your business processes with Infoware

Your processes are your business. This makes robust and efficient processes non-negotiable for long-term growth and business continuity.

When it comes to wholesaling: inventory accuracy and enhanced customer ordering capabilities are the baseline for you to stand out as a reliable supply partner. When your processes provide the experience your customers want, you can focus on long-term business relationships rather than competing mainly on price.

Your goal is to use technology to enhance how your business functions.

Process Enhancement

Do you need to revise the processes you have in place? With the right software partner this will be a collaborative approach.

According to Bain, a leading Supply Chain consulting firm, targeting significant gains through process re-engineering includes:

1. Focusing on customer needs
2. Standardising complex activities and automating repetitive work
3. Eliminating unproductive activities
4. Allocating team responsibilities for process stages
5. Determining effective approaches to working with third parties to gain maximum value from your business partnerships

None of this is unexpected or unusual. You can then consider the costs associated with each of your business processes to identify which actions to prioritise in your pathway to greater efficiency.

A core part of increasing efficiency is eliminating admin re-work, resulting from conflicting processes that require multiple hand-offs. These multiple hand-offs increase the risk of errors, as well as communication breakdowns that can occur during busy day-to-day.

Some good questions to ask yourself:

• Are any of your current processes limiting your team’s productivity?
• What customer experience processes do you have in place to support your team in delivering quality customer outcomes?
• Could your business processes be improved to reduce the pressure on yourself and your team both in productivity and removal of preventable errors?

Wholesaler Specific Processes

Lets take a closer look at the wholesaler specific processes that you can improve or transform with the right solution:

Customer Order Fulfilment Process

View and manage the entire ordering process in one system that covers contractual customer pricing, stock availability, quotes, picking and delivery. 

• Remove data entry and data entry errors. Receive customer orders via an order portal, using infoware’s PDF translator of emailed orders, or through Infoware’s EDI capability. 
• Empower customers to make informed decisions by providing fact sheets, images, and brochures. Provide industry specific information such as safety data sheets or tasting notes.
• Ensure accurate stock availability with minimal out of stocks. 
• Make customer portal ordering simple with default ordering templates based on their historical purchases or preferred products, using their contract pricing so they can make an informed decision. 
• Manage your order-to-fulfilment process with Infoware’s Run Planner tool, providing a consistent single source of truth shared across all your team for run planning, allocation of orders, manifest generation, and picking. 
• Increase your productivity and reduce picking errors by utilising wave and discrete picking, with freight label printing functionality. Applying freight labels at the time of picking ensures the correct product is delivered to the correct customer. 

Purchasing Process

Infoware’s predictive purchasing intelligently creates supplier purchase orders for the required stock lines, based on your sales trends. 

• Stock levels are based dynamically on weeks of stock on hand per supplier. 
• No more editing of Purchase Orders based on out of date static minimum-maximum stock level quantities.

Inventory Management

• Implement technologies such as RF barcode scanning to improve speed and accuracy across your inventory management process. 
• Easily keep supplier purchase prices up to date to ensure sales margins are maintained from the effective price change date. Simply upload the suppliers price list in the defined template and Infoware does the rest. 

Other Processes

• Manage supplier funded rebates and associated special pricing. Then easily claim back rebates monthly from each supplier through Infoware. 
• Tools for micro managing your gross profit. 
• Automated credit control process to block overdue accounts.  

Process Re-engineering

Many wholesaler systems are hamstrung by un-changeable functionality restricting your business’ ability to breathe and focus on what you are good at.

There are two potential outcomes here – you are blocked out of competing for some future contracts, or you find a way to develop a workaround that ends up causing errors losing your focus on what you are good at.

At their worst, such workarounds can quickly turn into inefficient process bottleneck headaches. What you need is a software partner that can work with you to develop custom automations within your software to sidestep the pain of such bottlenecks and integrate into your existing processes.

If you are looking to ensure you can make the most from your investment now and into the future, then you need a software partner that can deliver customised process automation that can support the new business opportunities that will arise.

How will Infoware help re-engineer your processes?

While spreadsheets or other short term fixes may work for a time, they often end up costly and are unsustainable. When you put a bandage on visible symptoms of one or more problems, you may miss their importance as you move forwards until it is too late to correct with your customer.

Infoware Services delivers a single source of truth “whole of business” solution across ecommerce, operations, and accounting. Infoware provides a very stong baseline in the wholesale market place. Customisations can be performed when required, protecting your investment now and in the future.

References:

1. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-cons-process-intelligence-for-supply-chains-and-manufacturing-operations.pdf
   
2. https://www.bain.com/insights/management-tools-business-process-reengineering/
   
3. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ca/Documents/about-deloitte/ca-en-covid-19-smb-recovery-toolkit-aoda.pdf
   
4. https://www.bcg.com/capabilities/cost-management/leadership-development/expert-insights/gideon-walter