Building an Indirect Sales Distribution Strategy
Learn how to build an indirect distribution strategy that will benefit all stakeholders and maximize your potential growth.
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ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING
Improve Core Business Functionality & Communication for Building Matierals Manufacturers
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WHAT IS ERP?
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a business process management software that allows businesses to use a system of integrated applications to help streamline processes and information across your company. In addition to automating many back office functions related to technology, services, and operations, the goal of ERP software is to improve internal business processes and overall business performance. Additionally, ERP software can help with reducing labor costs and IT expenses, and improve collaboration between channel partners.
ERP is beneficial for building material manufacturers to optimize a variety of processes, such as:
- Distribution and supply chain management
- Price quoting and CPQ applications
- Inventory management
- Data flow and real time updates
- Channel partner relationship management
WHAT IS NETSUITE?
NetSuite is a cloud-based ERP software that is engineered to scale with your company as it grows and to streamline mission-critical processes, allowing you to respond to new market opportunities swiftly and confidently. NetSuite ERP gives you the tools you need to accelerate growth and drive innovation.
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WHY YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS ERP
An ERP system is able to provide functionality for all your business processes by streamlining them into a single database. Information is able to flow across departments with ease, in addition to increasing transparency in all avenues of your company. Integrated ERP systems are able to alert distributors of potential problems, such as low productivity, low stock, and missing delivery dates. The ability to stay on top of potential problems and streamline information can save your company thousands of dollars.
Additionally, ERP software forecasts elasticity and pricing demands, which can be virtually impossible to do manually. This helps you stay competitive in the building materials market and productive while maintaining economic growth.
Integrating an ERP can help you:
- Eliminate data redundancy and errors
- Increase revenue growth
- Improve inventory management
- Reduce order times
- Analyze financial reports effectively and knowing your true costs
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Getting Started with ERP
ERP helps your business run smoothly, forecast for the future, and should scale as your business grows—but getting started with a large scale system is daunting, to say the least. To help insure your ERP implementation is a triumph, we've outlined the basic steps to take, and how an implementation partner like ManoByte can smooth out the process.
Step One: Business Process Review
Why are you considering implementing an ERP for your business? Before you begin, make sure you know the answer to this question. Review the current processes in your business to identify challenges, gaps, and information silos. When you're in the trenches of your business every day, identifying these things may be more difficult, so you many want to bring in an agency to review and audit your processes with you.
Understanding the state of your business processes helps you develop the right goals, which in turn gives you what to focus on when configuring your ERP system.
Step Two: Platform Configuration
Setting up an all-encompassing system like an ERP takes time, but it'll take more time down the road to fix if it's configured incorrectly. At the same time, it's easy to get overwhelmed in the process. Keep your business challenges and goals in mind as you set up the platform, and focus on developing the right core functionality that can be built off of later.
Step Three: Data Migration
Data you collected on your previous systems will need to be transferred over to your new ERP, and data that will come from outside the ERP will need to be integrated with it so all data remains consistent across platforms.
Migrating data is also an opportunity to clean up data, like scrubbing contact lists, reviewing any segmentation strategies you may have, or updating your product catalog to remove discontinued products or add new ones. Reviewing and cleaning data can also help resolve some challenges your team may have with communication, pricing, and more.
If you need to set up integrations with other systems, an agency with an experienced development team can help you get everything connected and running smoothly. Some systems have approved integrations with one another, but set up may be complicated—or you may need something developed custom to meet your needs. Don't let integrations stop you from utilizing an ERP for your business! The right development partner can keep the data flowing.
Step Four: Train for Success
You've configured your ERP, added in all your data, and set up any integrations—but don't press go just yet! Make sure your internal team and any partners, like distributors and retailers, who will need to use the new system, get proper training before switching everything over. Low adoption is one of the major reasons implemention fails for software platforms like EPR, and the right training program increases adoption.
Larger enterprises might benefit from a phased approach where different sections of the business are trained one at a time and moved onto the new system. For example, you might benefit from working with certain regions of your sales team at a time. This also helps you test training materials and improve them to hopefully streamline the process as you go along and develop the right materials for new employees in the future.
Training, especially for a large team, can be daunting. This is another place where partnering with an agency is beneficial. From developing the strategy and materials to running or recording training sessions, an experienced agency can help get the entire business on the same page for ERP use and adoption and answer any questions the team has.
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ERP Tools for Your Business
Financial Planning
NetSuite ERP is optimized to expedite daily financial transactions, accelerate closes, and ensure compliance. NetSuite uses employing native intuitive planning, budgeting, and forecasting solutions features. The cloud-based platform offers visibility into financial performance without being limited by a location-based platform.
Supply Chain Management
Through NetSuite ERP, companies are able to define, execute, and support supply chain/distribution management plans from a single, collaborative platform. NetSuite's various tools allow users to gain real-time visibility, increase service leads, reduce supply chain costs, and manage variances.
Procurement
NetSuite ERP is designed to improve the accuracy of procure-to-pay processes and optimize for cost-certainty. Requisitioning and purchasing processes can be automated and viewed from a user-configurable Procurement dashboard.
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