Industries · Wholesale & Distribution
SAP Business One for wholesale distribution
Multi-warehouse inventory, customer-specific pricing, high order volumes and thin margins. This is the environment we know best, and the one SAP Business One® handles well when it is configured by people who understand it.
- The cycle
- Purchase · Receive · Hold stock · Price · Take the order · Pick and pack · Ship · Invoice and collect
- Alongside SAP Business One
- Inventory Counting, B2B eCommerce, Sales Rep App, Integrations
The operating lifecycle
Buy, hold, price, ship, collect
The general distribution cycle. Everything else on this site is a variation of it.
Stage 01
Purchase
Buying against demand rather than against a hunch: reorder points, lead times and what is already on order.
What breaks as you grow
Reorder points set once and never revisited. Buyers work from a spreadsheet because the system's suggestion stopped being credible.
Handled by
Requirements
What distributors need from the system
Inventory across locations
Warehouses, bins, transfers and stock that matches the books, with batches and serials where they matter.
Pricing that follows the customer
Price lists, volume and period discounts, special prices and contract pricing without spreadsheets.
Fast, accurate order entry
From reps, from customers online and from CSRs, without re-keying.
Purchasing that anticipates demand
Reorder points, vendor lead times, landed costs and MRP where it makes sense.
Margin visibility
Gross profit by customer, item, rep and route, at document level.
Financial control
AR, AP, credit limits, statements and a month-end that closes on time.
Recommended architecture
What a wholesale & distribution operation usually ends up running
Derived from the lifecycle above rather than picked from a catalogue: these are the systems its stages actually call on.
- CoreSAP Business OneFinancials, inventory, pricing, purchasing and orders in one system of record.Overview
- Layer 01Inventory CountingSee it
- Layer 02B2B eCommerceSee it
- Layer 03Sales Rep AppSee it
Every layer connects through supported interfaces, reading and writing the same records. None of them keeps its own copy of your prices.
Mapping
Where the work usually goes
- 01Reps phone in orders and the office re-keys them.Sales Rep App with the customer's real pricing and stock.
- 02Customers email orders against an outdated price sheet.B2B eCommerce portal priced from SAP Business One price lists.
- 03The annual physical count shuts the warehouse for days.Cycle counting with barcode devices, synchronized to SAP Business One.
- 04Shelf and bin labels lag behind price changes.Label printing driven by SAP Business One item and price data.
- 05Reporting means exports and pivot tables.Queries, Crystal Reports and dashboards on the live database.
Questions
Wholesale & Distribution questions
Next step
Talk to someone who has configured SAP Business One for your kind of operation.
Bring your order flow, your inventory headaches and your reporting wish list. We will tell you what SAP Business One does out of the box and what we would build around it.