Wholesale Distribution
The “Break Bulk” Industry
The Wholesale Distribution industry is typically where quantities of products are bought in bulk directly from manufacturers and then segregated into small quantities to enable their customers to purchase quantities as per the need. Some common areas are where Distributors sell to Contractors (for electrical, plumbing, HVAC, building supplies..), schools and hospitals; having procured from Manufacturers. These Distributors, thus have to be strong in demand forecasting, management of efficient procurements while maintaining the warehouse inventory, distribution center along with the timely shipping of products to the retailers or customers.
Global Reach – Disruptive Environment
- Globalization and digitization led disruption offers myriad of challenges as well as opportunities to operators in this area. It is imperative on the players to respond to these trends positively to increment growth and clinch cost reduction opportunities.
- This industry is at an inflection point of rapidly changing business fundamentals and to turn this into an advantage. It requires radical rethinking of business, strategies and the way we operate.
- As with every sphere, the “Customer First” approach is central to driving businesses to exponential growth. to accomplish this efficiently technology plays a key and integral role.
- The future of this industry and future of businesses in this industry lies in radical rethinking of customer strategies from just simply meeting customer needs to proactively pre-empting problems and delivering solutions.
- There is a paradigm shift required in the way inventory, logistics and pricing are determined and this shift to be brought through technology driven analytics including analytics.
- Historically Distributors, are not alone in compensating for the lack of reporting within their legacy systems by creating and maintaining their own outside reports in external data sources like spreadsheets. This creates increased time lag and reduced time to react, slowing down and delaying the process of action leading to lost opportunities.
- The wholesale distribution workforces are typically aging and create succession planning challenges. Attracting and retaining talent requires a changed approach to business to imbibe digitalization of the core and supporting business functions and operations
- By the very nature of the business and going by the competitiveness, this industry requires efficient management of margins for its sustainability and growth.
The Meeting of Minds
- Like all other businesses, the wholesale distribution industry requires technology-oriented thinking as it is key to the growth of the company as a whole. SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain Management solutions offer a holistic solutioning towards this objective.
- In this industry, cost management is critical to growth. Efficiency of supply chain management and better visibility is guaranteed through SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain Management solutions
- With the Cloud SaaS model, SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain Management solutions ensure there is no added stress on costs and margins of this business with the system implementation.
- In addition to enabling businesses, it is imperative to leverage IT to truly energize growth and for this analytics becomes a key. Business Analytics is an integral part of SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain Management solutions offering real time analytics on the business critical information.
- Not only for enabling businesses to truly energize growth; it is important to leverage IT especially through use of Analytics. Business Analytics is an integral part of SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain Management solutions offering real time analytics of Business critical information.
- With the highly dynamic and volatile Tariff and trade laws internationally, there is a critical need for expertise in Global rollouts with taxation and international business processes. Percipere brings in this expertise with its exposure to multiple geographies of implementation.
- Timely reaction to changing business environments requires real-time reporting capabilities which is possible with analytics integrated with the core business processes and based on ERP systems.