Distributors and wholesalers

How work moves at a distributor or wholesaler

Orders come from everywhere. Some customers send EDI or order through a portal. Many more email a purchase order, call inside sales, text a rep or hand a counter clerk a list. Inside sales enters the order in the ERP, checks stock and price, and promises a ship date. Some lines are in stock. Some are special orders bought from a vendor for this customer. Some go on backorder.

The warehouse picks, packs and stages the order, or a vendor drop-ships it. Purchasing buys to replenish stock and to fill special orders, and receiving checks what arrives against the purchase order. Shipping books carriers or loads the firm's own trucks. Billing invoices, applies customer-specific pricing and rebates, and handles the returns, shortages and damage claims that come back. Accounts payable matches vendor invoices to purchase orders and receipts.

The roles are outside reps, inside sales, a counter where there is one, purchasing, warehouse leads and pickers, drivers, billing and credit, and an operations manager who sees the whole flow only through the ERP's reports.

Where it usually breaks

Orders are retyped from every channel

A customer emails a PDF purchase order. Inside sales types it into the ERP line by line, and fixes the part numbers that do not match. The original stays in the inbox, unconnected to the order. That is the re-entry trap, and it is where wrong items and wrong quantities start.

Special orders vanish between receiving and the customer

A part bought for one customer arrives, gets received into general stock or a shelf in the back, and nobody tells the rep. The customer calls to ask. That is the handoff gap. See special-order parts that get lost after they arrive.

Backorders sit in a report nobody works

The ERP lists open backorders. Which ones the customer still wants, which have a vendor date and which were filled another way lives in reps' heads. That is the invisible queue. The guide on nobody knowing what's in the warehouse starts the same way.

Pricing exceptions and credits are settled one at a time

A rep agrees a special price on the phone. The invoice goes out at list. The customer short-pays, and billing, sales and the customer settle it by email weeks later. Returns and vendor credits run the same way. That is the exception swamp. See quotes and invoices that don't match and vendor invoices that don't match purchase orders.

Work we have built here

For WERCS Inc., an industrial service company, we built PAM, a back office that runs the parts catalog, vendor document import, inventory, the warehouse and receiving, and keeps all of it in step with QuickBooks, so a part received or used is recorded once. The same problems sit at the center of a distributor's day.

The first workflow we usually look at

Usually order entry: from the customer's order arriving, in whatever form, to a correct order in the ERP with its price and ship date. It happens dozens or hundreds of times a day, it touches inside sales, the warehouse and billing, and its errors show up downstream as wrong shipments, credits and short-pays. If special orders or receiving cost the business more, the Spec says so and focuses there.

We sit with inside sales on a busy morning, follow a set of recent orders from arrival to invoice, and count how long each took to enter, how often it was touched again and what changed between the order and the invoice.

The systems in the picture

A distributor or wholesaler usually runs some mix of these:

• An ERP for orders, purchasing, inventory, pricing and billing
• A warehouse management system or handheld scanners, where they exist
• EDI and customer portals for the largest accounts
• A shared order inbox and phones at inside sales
• Shipping and carrier systems
• Spreadsheets for special orders, backorders, rebates and contract pricing

What a Workflow Spec looks like here

A Workflow Spec for a distributor or wholesaler is priced by deployment, and takes up to five business days on site. We sit at the order desk, walk the warehouse and receiving, watch billing work credits and short-pays, and interview the people who touch an order from arrival to payment. You get the workflow map, the business case, an adoption design built for the people who would use the tool, and a fixed proposal for the build. The answer can be not to build. Details are on how we work.