Post Link: Wholesale ERP and Sales Order Management: What You Should Know

Wholesale ERP and Sales Order Management: What You ShouldKnow

If you’re running a wholesale business today, the one piece of software that you are guaranteedto have is an ERP (aka, your accounting system). Whether it’s something basic likeQuickbooks or a behemoth like SAP, if you don’t have one, you cannot survive. Ask a businessowner what they “run their business on”, and they’ll give you the name of their ERP.

ERPs are fundamentally about one thing: ledgers. Remember that Accounting 101 class youtook in college? When they made you fill out those tables of debits and credits and balancethem out? That’s a ledger, and an ERP is basically a huge digital interface to those crusty oldbooks.

ERP Software: A Factual Representation of Your Business

In other words, an ERP is basically a huge collection of hard facts, recorded in perpetuity, aboutfinancial or inventory events. A customer was invoiced on this date for that amount. This unitof stock was received at that warehouse. Cash was received on this date to settle that invoice. No ambiguity.

Unfortunately, a huge portion of real business is not set in stone. It’s live conversationsbetween your customer-facing staff about transactions that might happen in the future.

Enter the sales order.

Sales Order Management Software: Technology that Powers Conversationswith Your Customers

Unlike an invoice, which is the core document of an ERP, a sales order is not a hard fact. Ithasn’t happened yet. It’s a conversation about a transaction between your business and acustomer that will most likely happen, but it could change in any number of ways before itactually happens and becomes an invoice.

Here’s the problem. ERPs see sales orders as second-class citizens to invoices. To an ERP,they’re the annoying period of ambiguity before things get set in stone. They’re the crying babyat the dinner table that needs to be tolerated until it goes to sleep and the adults can talk.

Most ERPs provide a user-unfriendly-interface for sales orders that looks exactly like the one forinvoices (sorry, not everyone who works at a brand is an accountant, and not everyone thinksan invoice data-entry interface is easy to use). Some (e.g. Quickbooks Online) do not providesales orders at all.

Unfortunately for ERPs, sales orders are where your business actually happens. Sales ordersare the living documents that represent the interactions between your customer-facing staff(e.g. sales reps and customer service people) and your customers. Invoices are the domain ofyour finance people, and as crucial as they are, finance is not the front-line of your business (orat least, I hope it’s not).

In the consumer world, the innovation around sales order management is incredible. Shopifyprovides an amazing experience for a consumer to place a sales order on the web (akaeCommerce). Square provides an amazing experience for ringing up sales orders for in-storeshoppers (aka Point-of-Sale). Neither experience looks or feels anything like an invoice inQuickBooks or SAP.

Sales orders are not full stops. They are question marks. Your ability to provide an amazingcustomer experience around turning those question marks into full stops is what differentiatesyou from your competition.

You know that story about Jet Blue where the CEO says that they were able to innovate to getboarding times down to 15 minutes because they didn’t know that they couldn’t?

When I was running operations for a brand in California back in 2008, I was looking for thesoftware to "run our business” and ended up guiding our entire vendor evaluation processtowards pure sales order management solutions like iCongo, because I didn’t know what ERPwas or that I needed one. Every time I saw an ERP it seemed so far away from what reallydrove our business, which was excellence in handling sales orders and serving our customers.

I eventually chose an ERP because we did need one on our backend, but I was always left withthis nagging feeling that I’d left something behind, that the focus had slipped from the mostimportant thing: the technology that powers our most important conversations with ourcustomers.

That technology is sales order management.

Post originally located at: www.handshake.com/blog/wholesale-erp-som

Handshake | Sales Order Management and B2B eCommerce Solutions - www.handshake.com© Copyright 2015 Handshake Corp.