Last week, there was a blog posted at Capterra titled, Can You Spot the Hole in an Integrated System. It is a great story, and very truthful, about distribution companies moving to larger and integrated software systems. In the article, the author (Ryan) states that smaller and more specialized software is often times more flexible than larger integrated software. In other words, smaller software, such as accounting software, is more flexible for accounting than a integrated package would be.

The article goes on to talk about trade-offs in software. When your company get to a certain size, and can longer function on multiple “specialized” software packages, there is a need for a larger integrated software system. The trade-off mentioned is this: while benefiting the company as a whole, some areas of the company (accounting was used as the example) will forfeit certain flexibilities that they have grown accustomed to.

My point in bringing up this article is that companies do not necessarily have to give up flexibility when moving to an integrated system. In talking with companies, we hear this over and over again that companies have had to modify the way that they run their business in order to fit the software that they chose to purchase.

The developer of the software should be able to modify, not customize, the software so that it is flexible. The software ought to fit the way you run your business, and not the other way around.

As a distributor, one of the key areas in your business is where your actual product is located: your warehouse. You may have a single warehouse or you may have multiple warehouses. In any case, an effective warehouse management system equates to lower costs for your company and premium service to your customers. Here are 3 key benefits to an effective warehouse management system.

Better efficiency in bin location management

Whether you have a large or a small warehouse, when there are orders to fill with several item lines on them, it can mean a lot of moving around in the warehouse in order to physically fill the orders.

A way to avoid this is to have your software create a pick ticket in the order that the item locations are set in your warehouse. An efficient warehouse management system should be able to to manage bins, or locations, throughout a warehouse, or even in multiple warehouses.That way, the people filling the orders will have a natural progression through the warehouse, effectively saving time by working more efficiently.

Less shipping errors

A good warehouse management system should have a proper validation system to ensure that the correct items and the correct quantities are being shipped to your customers. Too many incorrect shipments can be a profit killer. It is costly, both in manpower and actual tangible costs, to process returns and to re-ship the corrected orders. In addition to those costs, there is also the intangible cost of hampering, or even losing, the relationship with your customer.

Often times when companies are looking for a good warehouse management system, the order validation is an area that is overlooked. Make sure that your warehouse management system has the means to check your orders to ensure that all items and quantities ready to be shipped match up with the items on the sales order. Making sure that you get a warehouse management system that has this capability will reward you with ROI many times over.

Better customer service

Having less shipping errors is going to enhance your customer service and strengthen your relationship with your customers. There are other ways that your warehouse management system can help you to give better service to your customers. Through the process of validating the shipment with the sales order, your system should be able to record which items are in which box. This way, if the shipment gets split up, and your customer calls wondering where the rest of their order is, you can better help them by knowing the contents of each box, and the tracking number for each of those boxes as well.

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Increasingly, we are talking with people who say something along the lines of, “your software will do everything that I need, but I’m wondering if we could also…”, and then they are off explaining something specific that is needed for a particular customer that they have, or a particular way that they have of doing things. After all, if your business is doing something a little different than most, its something that gives you a competitive advantage, right?

The point here is that you either have to have your distribution software fit your business, or you have to change your business to fit your software. “Out of the Box” software is just that, and is often difficult to “tweak” to your needs.

Now I’m not saying that DistributionPlus is custom software, but what I am saying is that since we are the developers of the software, it is fairly easy for us to change the software  to fit a particular need that a company may have.