What is distribution software?

Distribution software is the digital infrastructure that co-ordinates the systems that ensure your products and services reach your customers/clients with maximum efficiency.

This software connects several different systems to manage stock, purchase orders, multi-channel sales, accounts, and more. It will also include important elements for wholesalers and distributors such as courier integrations, warehouse management, and credit-control systems.

Unite your shipping with end-to-end integration

Distribution software helps to streamline the process of distribution, connecting organisations with couriers to gain advantages and efficiencies that save time and money. Automation can replace rekeying tasks, enabling accurate data transfer for every step of goods movement. This is faster and more reliable than manual management, which introduces more potential for errors.

Distribution software provides total insight into the distribution process. With direct integration with your courier, you now have full visibility of how quickly products and services are moving. This provides a deeper understanding of operations, while integration with couriers offers more options.

The software connects with various courier and shipment companies that can reach different areas with different systems, thus allowing businesses to be flexible and adaptive to changing conditions. This is essential in the ever-evolving business world of 2023 and beyond.

Power your warehouse operations with real-time data

Distribution software also delivers advantages in the form of control and co-ordination of the materials your business is busy distributing. That means warehouse management systems (WMS). By having a fully integrated WMS as part of your distribution software, you gain a series of important competitive edges that allow your operations to slice past and through the competition.

An integrated WMS as part of your distribution software allows you to avoid the most common causes of inadvertent stockouts. When you can be completely confident of exact stock levels in real-time, you can keep your distribution systems up to date at every stage, ensuring your clients and customers never fill out an order that will conclude with disappointment.

Integrated WMS means that your products can be stored with the maximum possible efficiency at all times. Whatever is needed most in a given moment can be monitored, since all of the warehouse's movements are funnelled through a single software suite. Trends and fluctuations can be detected, giving your business the foresight to move items around as and when needed. This allows your distribution to stay one step ahead of the game at all times.

An integrated WMS can react in real-time to customer orders. You don’t need to wait for new pick sheets to be printed or new pick routes to be planned for your staff. With properly managed distribution software installed across your operation, you can keep your pickers updated as and when orders arrive. Handheld terminals can tell them where to be and when, and keep your product mobile and managed at the same time. This is the power of proper distribution software.

Stay in control of your credit

Delicately designed distribution software is sure to integrate the final stage of any business’s most important process. Transaction handling. The command, control, and co-ordination of the flow and ebb of credit in and out of your accounts. By automating vast swathes of this process, and keeping your manual management of matters a lean and strictly limited part of your operation, distribution software delivers key advantages.

Credit control can really revolutionise how fast your invoices get handled. The extent to which small and medium sized businesses do not see invoices filled out and paid on time is shocking. Spending even more money on handling such matters manually has the potential to produce a black hole of expenditure that never ends. With automated client communication, you can be sure that the final stage of distribution is dealt with promptly and precisely.

Credit control allows for careful consideration of who and how your contacts procedures take place. There is no one size fits all policy when it comes to collecting what your business is owed. Well-worked-out distribution software design is aware of this. As a result, you can programme it to contact different customers with different tones, at different times, by different means, and with different levels of overall urgency.

Credit control ensures that your customers get the level of reliable professionalism that is more and more expected in the marketplace of 2023 and beyond. Manually managed credit control can make mistakes much more readily. Messages can be sent too soon. Too many contact requests can go to the wrong place. The overall tone could be misunderstood and misidentified, especially if a manual external contact agent is wearied from dealing with dozens of similar situations. By automating these processes through distribution software, your relationship with your clients is completely within computer control. Always exactly as predictable, reliable, and adaptive as is needed.

Discover how leading wholesale and distribution software are providing the vital link in global supply chain in our latest ebook.