How Can Your Sales Team Effectively Use Your ERP Data?

As distributors, you love your ERP system and all it offers.  The software is designed for processing and storing large volumes of business transactions, such as customer orders, vendor purchases, and invoice lines. The complexity of ERP data cannot easily give insights into customer buying patterns, track vendor performance metrics, or monitor sales trends.

Furthermore, how do you get the data out of your system for your sales and executive teams? Well, you can get the data out if you have someone on staff that can write custom crystal reports. However, wouldn’t it be easier if you had software that provides integrated built-in sales and business intelligence tools?

Business Intelligence (BI) Tools

With business intelligence software for your ERP, executives see the big picture and what to prioritize next. They can identify issues at the product, warehouse, and customer levels. By using inventory scorecards and reports, executives can easily track values that influence costs, sales, margins, and promotions.

For example, business analytic tools that look at customer life cycle can show you when churn happens and why. In addition, Business Intelligence (BI) can help you identify and address pain points to reduce churn. Further, BI tools can help improve margins and increase profitability.

• Gain control of increasing overhead by easily uncovering rising expense trends.
• Identify product lines that are trending up or down in sales and profitability.
• Role-based dashboards, scorecards, and reports can help align your team with your goals.

ERP Tools That Fit Your Needs

Pick a solution that will work best for your company. Then, seek out software that will natively integrate with your ERP for an easy transition.  Look for prebuilt templates and reports for the distribution industry. Find a software company that understands your business and needs. This will ultimately make the process more streamline and have your teams running more effectively from day one.