Accelerating the movement of merchandise offers significant advantages for everyone involved—end customers, retailers, and particularly wholesalers. You likely have already implemented many foundational improvements in your wholesale operations, such as intelligent warehousing, bar-coding, efficient racking systems, enhanced transportation options with same-day or overnight deliveries, and specialized software designed to expedite the delivery of merchandise to its destination.
Even a small reduction in merchandise in the warehouse can be valuable, especially true with high bulk-to-value goods. Maybe this recovered space creates room for another small product line or delays needing additional warehouse space.
A small decrease in warehouse congestion might allow goods to move more fluidly. This could produce more shelf space for better placement of products within the warehouse or more productive space for the people who make things happen.
Any improvement in faster delivery has to produce a corresponding improvement in payment. Some wholesalers have been able to increase cash receipts by one full day.
Both sales reps and customers can use a sound customer order management system, and it should provide many features that can contribute to faster, improved customer service.
These features are:
QuickBooks integration is essential for syncing all customer account information. Giving your customers, sales reps, and inside staff the ability to access all account info from the system will prevent delays and speed up the order fulfillment process.
Since the software works directly with QuickBooks, automatically processing incoming orders saves time and labor. Since orders flow right through, there are fewer errors and quicker turnaround time.
All orders are fillable because the rep or customer has been able to look at quantities on hand, the specific pricing that applies to that customer, and the order histories of each customer and each item prior to submitting the order.
Incoming orders tend to be error-free since they follow a defined format. Time-savings result from the home office team spending less time talking with order placers and determining how to fix their errors.
The status of each order is visible to the buyer and the sales rep, so no phone calls or emails will be asking about ship dates or carrier data.
Automatic warehouse integration saves time by instantly telling the warehouse about each new required shipment.
A customer order management system with these features could improve your distribution business. You will save time, reduce errors, and improve the overall customer experience.