Streamline Your Distribution Processes To Reduce Costs & Deliver Orders More Efficiently
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Simplify Complexities
Reduce Costs
Deliver on Promises
Consumer Packaged Goods
One Modern Microsoft Cloud Solution To Manage The Complexities Of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
One Microsoft Partner with the Know-How to Simplify It All
For distributors specializing in delivering hard goods, the uncertainties of recent years create many challenges:
- Declining margins
- Intense competition
- Reimagining new remote working environments
- Developing new sales channels
Western Computer can show you how to solve these challenges and contend with managing complex product development, procurement, sales, and warehouse management processes while also continuing to offer customers the service and experience they expect.
Formidable Distribution Challenges:
Economic
Trade tariffs, currency fluctuations, high inflation, higher interest rates, declining consumer confidence, and increasing fuel costs.
Regulatory
Occupational health and safety plus traceability requirements.
Suppliers
Short shipments, vendors who prioritize larger customers, unpredictable supply quantities, and erratic on-time delivery—only 34% on-time-performance for global shipping containers.
Competitors
Discounting, aggressive promotions, new niche entrants, manufacturers selling direct to customers, online marketing, and launching new products.
Retail Customers
Increasing order volumes and penalties for missing on-time delivery commitments, demand for frictionless return process, and mandatory order portals.
End-User Customers
Increasing price sensitivity, accelerating online comparisons, shopping for direct-to-consumer offers, sustainability focus, and growing service expectations—order fulfillment, self-serve, order tracking, and showrooming.
Why You Can Count On Western Computer
Western Computer—a Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist and Inner Circle Member—architects modern Dynamics ERP solutions to prepare consumer packaged goods companies to meet their distribution challenges.
Our Microsoft Dynamics ERP Solutions Provide End-to-end Supply Chain Visibility That Resolves Supply/demand Imbalances While Optimizing Production & Distribution.
We also collaborate side-by-side with you to solve the complexities of your processes—implementing intelligent technology to simplify your workflows:
- Gain the agility to meet frequently changing customer demands
- Develop new product innovations without severe economic impact
- Improve analytics to view crystal-clear insights of what to do next
- Predict customer payments reliably
- Manage cash flow more effectively
- Generate accurate forecasts
- Reduce transaction and account fraud
- Decrease wrongful rejections
- Minimizes administrative costs
- Optimize the cost of equipment, inventory, and demand fulfillment
Inventory Management
Indications It’s Time for a Change
High inventory turns indicate you sell goods quickly and customer demand is high. To capitalize on your opportunity, the next step in your evolution is to eliminate the roadblocks that keep you from expanding into additional distribution centers:
- Manual data entry
- Inventory counts without scanners
- Limited ability to rebalance inventory across the network
- Diminishing warehouse space
Forecasting
See What’s Coming and Respond Quickly
To forecast more accurately, consumer packaged goods companies need to go beyond traditional processes. These are the signs that indicate it’s time to upgrde your forecasting capabilities:
- Experiencing consistent stockouts.
- Using Excel spreadsheets to manipulate data offline to predict inventory levels.
- Writing off goods in inventory due to damage, deterioration, theft, changes in market demands, or misplacement.
- Encountering disappointed customers when failing to meet on-time delivery promises.
Fulfillment
Are you breaking delivery promises and hurting your reputation?
Customers lose patience when suppliers miss on-time deliveries. You risk paying significant customer penalties and fines for not performing as promised, and you may even lose customers altogether if you regularly experience any of these scenarios:
- Increasing stockouts
- Unreliable supply due to short shipments
- Manual order picking that delays orders
Reporting & Analytics
Can you make sense of your data?
In the consumer packaged goods industry, consumers shopping online generate more data to analyze. More data enables your distribution business to spot patterns, identify issues, respond quickly, and resolve multiple challenges:
- Grappling with low profitability without adequate intelligence to make decisions.
- Disrupting declining YoY sales.
- Maintaining cash flow while accounts receivables run high.
- Eliminating data silos that prevent visibility into critical KPIs.
- Lagging workflows caused by manual data entry and paper-based pricing.
- Limited visibility into customer and product profitability.
Distribution Apps Available From Western Computer
We have helped hundreds of distributors simplify the most complex processes they face with IP developed by our knowledgeable team.
365ContainerImport by Western Computer
- Measure margins more accurately.
- Capture landed costs of goods in real-time—including transport costs.
- Avoid unwelcome financial reporting surprises.
- Track container transports to know the status of in-transit goods.
365TradeManagement by Western Computer
- Solve complex calculations.
- Track royalties, rebates, co-ops, and commissions.
- Offer flexible promotions and pricing.
- Arm the sales team with promotions to win more opportunities.
- Meet big-box retailer compliance requirements.
Advanced Order Management
- Enable omni-channel sales and delivery.
- Increase sales by listing products on multiple sales channels such as Amazon and Walmart.
- Expand sales by integrating with direct-to-consumer platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce.
- Deliver immersive experiences and communicate efficiently by offering B2B portals to customers, partners and vendors.
- Centralize order management of multiple sales channels.
- Monitor order fulfillment proactively and manage by exception.
- Extend communications with your trading partners portal.
365ParcelShip by Western Computer
- Generate accurate shipping costs for every order.
- Enable more sales by offering rate shopping and shipping quotes.
- Automate warehouses with hand-held scanners.
- Leverage low-cost shipping options for customers.
- Proactively monitor order fulfillment.
Featured Resources
Ready to Get Started?
When you partner with Western Computer, you get more than a fully integrated solution built for the unique operations of distributors. You’re also backed by 30 years of extensive distribution experience and a nationwide team of technical and business experts.
Talk with a consumer packaged goods distribution specialist or schedule a demo today:
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