Many wholesale businesses face the same challenges
What challenges do wholesalers face?
How to deal with advanced pricing and discount structures?
Wholesale companies use sophisticated pricing and discount structures to win over their customers. Some examples include:
- Fixed discount amounts
- Discount structures based on quantities
- Staff Discounts
- …
In addition, these prices should be communicated to customers via price lists, the e-commerce website or via digital price cards in the warehouse or store.
Margin percentages and reports make it easier to set prices and discount structures.
How to manage surcharges such as Bebat, Recupel,...?
In various sectors it is necessary to add surcharges to orders and invoices, such as Bebat, Recupel, Transport,…
Business Central in combination with an add-on allows you to configure these surcharges and the conditions when these surcharges should be added so that they are automatically added to the relevant orders and invoices.
These surcharges are additionally entered financially taking into account rules such as VAT and serve as a strong basis for various reporting requirements.
How do we get detailed insights into stock?
Implementing an ERP gives you better and more accurate insights into your physical inventory, as well as financial inventory.
Physically accurate stock: By implementing an ERP, possibly in combination with a mobile scanning solution and/or combined with an integration with an external warehouse, your organization always has an up-to-date picture of your stock. Business Central allows you to define multiple warehouses with different stock locations in each warehouse, just think of your internal warehouse, external warehouse, quarantine warehouse or location, different warehouse for your technicians,… In addition, Business Central takes into account different stock statuses such as available stock, reserved stock for production, sales, projects or service, stock yet to be received from production or purchase,…
Financially accurate stock: By implementing an ERP combined with correct stock valuation techniques (e.g. Standard Cost, FIFO, LIFO, Weighted Average,…) your organization always has an up-to-date picture of your financial stock.
Through these accurate insights, your organization may be able to reduce the level of inventory required. Combined with our data warehouse and our reporting expertise, we create inventory reports so you get insights into KPIs such as number of days of stock per item or item group, inventory turnover,…
Assogem
Distributes 350,000 kitchen appliances per year
How to reduce and optimize stock?
From once your organization has gained proper insights into its inventory, you may wish to consider whether stock levels are optimized, this taking into account with your forecast, stock rotation, purchases and strategic decisions of the company and the lifecycle of the article. By connecting Business Central to stock optimization tools, you can adjust your stock levels often reduce them, without a negative impact on delivery possibilities to your customers..
How to optimally manage articles in online sales?
Business Central allows for quick and efficient integrate with E-commerce solutions. Moreover, managing articles is also much easier (PIM)
Organizations with simple and limited product information, product information can be stored in Business Central by using the attributes functionality. This information is seamlessly exchanged with E-commerce solutions such as Shopify, Marcando and DynamicWeb.
For organizations with larger and more complex requirements around managing product information, we recommend storing product information in a Product Information Management System.
There are several solutions for this: the PIM solution from DynamicWeb or other PIM solutions such as Pimcore, Perfion Pimics,…
How to best inform customers about deliveries of goods and services?
When you receive orders from customers, it is important to inform your customer when the goods or services will be delivered.
ATP: Available to promise (ATP) calculates dates based on the reservation system. It performs an availability check of unreserved quantities in inventory on planned production, purchases, transfers and sales returns. Based on this information, Business Central calculates the delivery date of the customer’s order as the items are available either in stock or on scheduled receipts.
CTP: Capable to promise (CTP) assumes a “what if” scenario, which applies only to item quantities that are out of stock or scheduled orders. Based on this scenario, Business Central calculates the earliest date the item can be available if it is to be produced, purchased or transferred.
How do you best manage your inventory?
To manage your stock levels correctly, it is important to get an accurate picture of future sales.
Managing a forecast and loading it into the ERP ensures that the ERP generates sufficient and timely purchase or production orders. In addition to loading the forecast, add-ons can be interfaced with Business Central to manage forecasts in conjunction with optimizing stock levels.
How do we best manage reorders?
In an ideal world, sales orders are always delivered complete and on time, but due to a variety of operational challenges, this may not always happen. Backorders or back orders must be followed up, and some wholesalers have specific rules such as:
- Back orders should be deleted automatically. Customer will add necessary items on subsequent orders
- Backorders may not be shipped separately, but will be shipped with a subsequent order
Such rules can be set up or built in Business Central so that this management can be done as smoothly as possible.
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How do we ensure optimal integration with customers?
A smooth digital link with customers via EDI (or later via the Peppol network) allows order information to be exchanged quickly and efficient exchange of order information. By combining Business Central together with an Addon and our partner Transus, allows you to reduce integration and mapping work between your application and your partner’s application. Transus is an EDI network with more than 100,000 trading partners already known. Voor een maandelijks fee kan je onbeperkt handelspartners use, send out unlimited trade messages, and trading partners who are not known in the Transus network are free of charge added.
How to make the best use of scanning solutions?
To get a correct view of the stock, wholesalers use mobile scanning solutions to track all stock movements within the warehouse. A mobile scanning solution integrated with the ERP ensures that all physical scanning actions are immediately reflected in the ERP to update both the physical and financial stock.
For the small and medium-sized organization, Tasklet Factory’s scanning solution can cover the needs. This software solution can be installed on virtually any recent hardware and connects effortlessly with Business Central.
For larger organizations that have a dedicated WMS solution, this solution can be connected to Business Central via integration.
For organizations using remote warehouses (3PL), the remote warehouse can be connected to Business Central via integration.
How to reduce manual interventions in online sales?
When a significant portion of your orders are placed through digital channels such as EDI and E-commerce, it is important to make your further processing of digitize and automate these orders. Ideally find your organization at a “no touch order” process in which there are no manual interventions for handling the order, except for the effective operations in the warehouse for performing the picking and shipping process.
How to best manage complaints?
After the delivery of goods and services, customers can report complaints to your organization. Een correcte opvolging van deze klachten to your customers and if relevant to your suppliers provides a professional impression and increased customer satisfaction. Through the complaint management addon in conjunction with Business Central, this process can happen flawlessly so that complaints are handled smoothly.
How to perform maintenance activities optimally?
Does your organization also maintenance activities? Business Central can be extended with a Field Service application/addon so that your technicians can perform the necessary maintenance activities can perform via registrations on a mobile application, fully integrated with Business Central. Depending on your needs, this could be a simple Field Service Addon or Dynamics 365 Field Service.
Why wholesalers choose Business Central
- Accessible anytime, anywhere.Dynamics 365 Business Central is platform- and browser-independent.
- Security and stability.Business Central has modern security and disaster recovery built in, storing your data in highly secure, state-of-the-art data centers owned and operated by Microsoft.
- Continuous update cycle.You always enjoy the latest version of Business Central.
- Easier maintenance of modifications. Het onderhouden van je aanpassingen, nu afgehandeld via extensions in Business Central, is more streamlined.
- No server fees.Never purchase a server or server software again with Business Central in the cloud.
- Take advantage of the full Microsoft stack.Take advantage of tools such as Excel, Outlook, Teams, CoPilot (AI), Power BI and other Dynamics 365 applications along with your ERP.
- New functionality.Business Central has an array of new functionality for your team, and it’s all accessible through a familiar Dynamics interface.
Ready to make the switch to Business Central?
Take a big step forward with your organization
At Sonical, we strive to optimize business processes through efficient ERP solutions, smart workstations and innovative automations. With a strong and dedicated team, we always put the customer first, leveraging Microsoft solutions to ensure the best fit for each organization. Our goal is to lead the Belgian ERP market, with a focus on quality and innovation, becoming a leading reference in the industry.
