Food distribution companies face unique and ever-changing challenges. With rapidly changing environments and considerations, the list of challenges facing distributors can be a long one. By powering your food distribution business with Prime FoodService, a modern, cloud ERP platform built within the Acumatica framework, businesses can tackle these five huge challenges all distributors face.
Driver Shortages
In a March 2021 poll a staggering 68% of respondents reported they were unable to find enough delivery drivers to meet their needs.
Prime FoodService’s built-in Route Management and mobile delivery management tools help fight this problem in a number of ways. Route optimization ensures that drivers are always taking the most effective and efficient route, while an easy to navigate UI means there are never costly time delays as drivers struggle to complete the delivery process.
These two factors combine to make sure that your drivers complete more deliveries quicker and more efficiently.
Freight Issues
Supply chain disruptions can cause massive knock-on effects that continue to trouble businesses long after the initial impact. By powering their operations with Prime FoodService they can avoid these troubles altogether.
Prime FoodService allows users to see and track all their data in real-time, ensuring there are no mix-ups in what is available vs sold out, shipped vs unshipped, or other common issues facing distributors. With the ability to integrate with third party data this ensures smooth sailing, allowing for alternative solutions to be found in the event of something short-shipping.
Product Shortages
As mentioned above, Prime FoodService has several tools to help distributors deal with product shortages. users are always up-to-date with their information, allowing for quick solutions to problems, ensuring distributors stay top of mind with customers. distributors can easily suggest replacements for their customers based off their order history, ensuring no gaps in purchasing, even with unavailable products.
Sales Growth
The sales guides mentioned above also have powerful sales-growth potential. They enable distributors to set up customer-specific profiles with a customer’s typical orders. This not only allows for easy order entry, but also allows for unique up and cross-sale opportunities, as users can add items they think a customer will need or would like to their order guide. This simplifies and streamlines the upsell process, not only benefiting the distributor, but also the customer, as they get a better, more personalized selection of offerings.
Non-Traditional Distribution
More and more distributors are taking up the burden of “drop shipping”, where they ship the product directly to the end consumer, bypassing their customer’s warehouses entirely. With enhancements that are new in the 2021 R1 Update this is now easier than ever before. Prime FoodService offers the ability to link drop-shipped orders directly to their purchase orders within the system, meaning there is no more need to manually link them. Order changes and vendor returns are all managed within the system as well, ensuring top of class customer service, even on non-traditional orders.
By powering your distribution business with Prime FoodService, built within the Acumatica framework, you are ensuring that your business is able to meet new, evolving challenges as they come up.
CRM software is useful for anyone who runs their own business. In our company We have implemented Firmao and I can honestly recommend it.