Wholesale Distribution Software for Smarter Supply Chains

Wholesale Distribution: A Case Study

B.O.S.S. streamlines wholesale distribution operations by providing real-time tracking, optimizing the quote building process, and ensuring full supply chain visibility. Here’s how it has helped one of our customers:

We were engaged by a wholesale distributor selling electrical components to commercial contractors. The owner suspected they were leaving money on the table because their manual process for quoting a bill of materials was oftentimes based on previous prices and not in line with how their competitors were raising prices due to inflation, tariffs or current demand. As a first step, we uploaded their QuickBooks data into RentMySoftware to see if an automated suggested pricing system could generate a sufficient return on investment by using our product. We found that just a 3% price increase in Q3 for certain products was enough to pay for an entire year of RentMySoftware. Lack of automation was clearly a problem worth solving!

In this case our customer needed consistently followed best practices in pricing followed by adjusted prices based on the monitoring of their competition. (particularly if it appears competitors have raised prices) They tolerated the status quo til now because it’s a fairly manual activity that requires reviewing a large range of information, all for a quote that in all likelihood (based on their conversion rate) won’t become an order. 

A lot goes into pricing at wholesale distributors. Just to generate a quote on a Bill of Materials (BOM), the salespeople have to look at several things.

1. They check if this quote request is coming through a current or past customer.
2. If the line item was previously ordered or quoted, they typically defer to the last price charged or quoted. (potentially causing loss of revenue if competitors have raised prices or if the original quote was generated too long ago)
3. They have to consistently check for new pricing data. They can’t expect prices or quotes to remain the same it’s more that 2 years old. (discounts and rebates can and do change all the time as well)
4. They need to look at if they have any of the line items of the BOM on hand (in their warehouse) and if so, when it was purchased and how much time remains on the warranty. (they need to age out inventory if it’s outside of or getting close to the end of the warranty period, which may be as short as 18 months)
5. They look at each BOM line item to see if it was ever sold to this potential customer or to a prior customer. (they need to determine when they ordered/quoted the item and how much it costed or was quoted) Currently, much of this information resides in QuickBooks today. The quotes that don’t turn into orders are lumped together under a MISC category, so finding out what was quoted, to whom and when, does take a quite bit of analysis. And since the quote request on the BOM includes many line items, this exponentially increases the number of steps involved.
6. If an item was never sold or quoted, they reach out to a number of wholesale distributor suppliers to start pulling together the manufacturer’s pricing and lead [delivery] time. With each manufacturer, their company has specific business relationships and pricing arrangements, including customer discounts, bulk discounts, combination discounts, rebates, and other temporary discounts. Not to mention, each discount or rebate is likely to have an expiration date.
7. They have to figure out each line item’s category, to determine if specific category level discounts can be applied. Quite often, if an item is not currently showing up with a discount, the salesperson can petition the manufacturer to add the line item under a category or negotiate for a discount or rebate.
8. Today, the company runs on multiple spreadsheets, so they also have to make sure the salesperson is using the latest spreadsheet, since prices, discounts and rebates are constantly updating.

Implementing B.O.S.S. will open up a world of automation that will directly impact the sales team. They will be able to create quotes more efficiently and feel much less pressure to price too aggressively (potentially leaving money on the table) with all the numbers right at their fingertips. And members of the C-Suite will appreciate the speed and efficiency of quote creation, and the minimized risk of having things slip through the cracks and the ability to track analytics throughout the process.

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