FoodService distribution companies looking to compete more effectively in this strained supply chain, can leverage modern ERP platforms that support every aspect of their business. If you fall into this category, here are some of the industry features you should look for in an agile ERP business management solution:
- Catch Weight with calculations for broken cases
- Minimum Order Control – Maintain your stock levels and your margins
- Substitutions and Short Shipments – See products that are frequently being substituted so that you can make decisions about changing suppliers or ordering alternative products
- Flexible Pricing – Vary pricing by product type or other criteria.
- Margin-Based Pricing – Price items based on a margin by the customer, by customer group, or buy a fixed dollar amount
- Tracking Actual and Adjusted Margins – Have the flexibility to factor in warehousing and/or marketing costs to calculate landed cost and adjust to optimize your margins
- Weekly Margin-Based Commissions – React with agility to changing prices from your vendors by adjust your own prices and commissions
- Route Management with Daily Time Cut-Offs – Understanding that you may not take any more orders over the phone after four o’clock, but you have an hour in between 4 to 5 to get in those last couple of orders, or to make some final adjustments. This allows you to start picking at night, and make sure that your trucks are loaded and ready to go at 5, 6, or 7 o’clock in the morning.
- Delivery & Trip Management with Cash Collections – Manage your delivery drivers within the same system that you use for your entire business and enable them to collect and enter cash transactions on site from the customer.
- Customer Order Guides – Your repeat customers place their typical orders on a regular cadence. Order Guides make it quick and easy for sales reps to enter orders but also to see what the last price paid was and also what items each customer has stopped ordering.
If a customer is not buying their eggs from you anymore, it most likely means they’re buying them from one of your competitors. Order guides help you see this trend and inform your conversations so that you can find alternative solutions; maybe cut the price on the eggs to get that business back, but make sure that the margins on you entire order are still where they need them to be.
- Traceability & Compliance – Avoid spoilage and waste while tracing products for recall purposes
- Lot Tracking with Expiration Dates – Beyond the industry specific needs, a modern ERP solution for foodservice distributors needs to be able to cover all of the needs of a food distribution business. You need to be able to:
- Track Quotes and See Sales Pipeline
- Offer e-Commerce and EDI
- Enable Electronic Signatures
- Support Food Manufacturing
Prime FoodService Software is a single ERP platform that provides all of the functionality along with industry specific features required by the foodservice distribution industry, built into the trusted Acumatica cloud ERP platform that is trusted by tens of thousands of people worldwide to be able to manage their business.
See the all the functionality that Prime FoodService Software has to offer in this on-demand demo