Distribution Management System
While sipping your favorite cappuccino at Starbucks that how the brand is able to maintain the same taste, the fine rich cocoa flavor with the same aroma, even though their major outlets are in the far end corners from here? How you are able to get a similar superfine quality of shoes from your favorite brand but at a different location than the previous one? Have you ever wondered how these multinational corporations like Nike, Unilever, Starbucks have dominantly captured the market with their untouchable quality, excellent service, easy availability, far reach-ability (global reach) and a significant growth rate? And most importantly the growing number of happy & loyal customers from years…
It’s because they have a great Supply Chain Management System which takes care of the end-to-end responsibility in an efficiently smoother way to make sure that everything is working fine without any flaws and the growth rate shows the increasing graph only.
Digging in Deeper: Supply Chain Management
The journey from being a raw material to becoming the final desired product; reaching the customers and satisfying them well has several steps to it. Supply Chain Management is the process that takes care of all these elementary steps by cutting down the extra cost, making the delivery faster, efficient and finally showing some good profit with its application by keeping firm control over these intermediate processes.
We have many global companies that have one of the best Supply Chain Management Systems backing up their increased revenue over the years like Unilever; the British-Dutch household and personal care company, H&M; the Swedish Clothing company, PepsiCo; food and beverage corporation, all have one of the best Supply Chain Management Systems throughout the globe and their market value is not hidden from anyone. So, checking on the Supply Chain Management, one can easily check on the revenue of the company and making sure to be the most active in the top bar.
To make sure that Supply Chain Management system is in the best state, there are certain steps to it and here we will see a very important step which is responsible for all the immediate steps required as soon as the product is ready to dispatch from manufacturer’s end to reach the potential customers for the usage— Distribution Management System also known as DMS.
What is the Distribution Management System?
“This is a management system that takes care of the products/services distributed/provided in the market in an effective and end-to-end way”
So, Distribution Management System is the process where the efficient working of the different process involved in any business is taken care of such as Logistics, Inventory, Sales & Purchase order management, Analytical tools required, Supply management. It takes care of all the processes that are involved once the product is out from the Manufacturing end waiting to enter the consumers’ territory.
Role of Distribution Management System in Supply Chain Management to Outperform your Competitors:
Let’s try to understand this by an example: A global firm G produces X, Y and Z products under its brand name. It has N number of warehouses in different parts of the world where it stores the bulk products of the respective categories. Now it has some hundreds of Distributors who deliver different products to the Market, some thousands of wholesalers, then some millions of retailers and some billion products are finally sold at the end of the process.
Now to track it all is the most important segment for any business to grow and we know that it has several tedious components attached to it like proper storage, safe delivery, checking on finances, inventory list, quality overview, customer satisfaction, product development, shipping & packaging, and a long list continues from here. And imagine doing it manually and getting it done from the employees hired… The consequences will be that the growth rate would take a deep dip because the employees will be busy doing the above-mentioned tasks and their productivity would decrease, leading to lesser implementation and more chaos, where the innovation would disappear and undue pressure would increase, making no visible changes at the end.
Don’t panic, because this is where the Distribution Management System keeps a check on! It takes care of almost every small component so that you can take care of your business, making it grow positively high! It’s a technological system that gives you insight about all the processes ongoing till the time your consumers become happy customers!
What is the importance of Distribution Management System in Business
It’s a no-hidden fact that the processes involving right from the manufacturer’s end to reach the desired clients and making the unstoppable profits is a no magic formula. It definitely asks a lot of hard and smart work in return which sometimes we are able to put in and sometimes not… This radically affects the business and ultimately the decline in the sales front but if we see how the top-notch players in the industry are outperforming every time, we would see the smart steps taken at the organizational level, making the supply chain efficient and incorporating an excellent implementation of it all where DMS plays a very key role.
Let’s see with the help of Distribution Management System, how anyone can change the phase of the business and make it more profitable. The following points show the implementation-after-effects of the Distribution Management System.
Zero Error in different Stages of Delivery
With the help of DMS, one can make sure that there are no errors in the delivery made, type of product placed, fine-state of the product, accurate time to be delivered at, exact quantity and finally the response rate of the consumers. All these steps need a proof check at every single point, to make the probability of any error negligible for which we require excellent communication, complete monitoring, a right account of the transactions and profit made
Help to keep data and information Organized, Systematic and Accurate:
As we have discussed that there are so many steps involved till the final check, making sure that they happen accurately is one step and the collection of the data which is well organized is another step. The organized data can be anytime reviewed in the future for deriving important decisions on requirement basis
Happy Customers lead to Happy Business
We all know this math, the most simple of all but many-a-times, company forget to keep a check on the most valuable part or say asset of a company due to several unavoidable & Important steps, here this is checked by DMS, and a happy consumer will directly reflect in the revenue generated at the end of the day
Well-Maintained Relationship of the Dealer and Manufacturer
A company very well knows that how gruesome it would be if they would be directly facing the consumers, thankfully, they have dealers to look into that, which keeps the smooth running of the business and required improvements from time to time. And getting all the details in an accurate way keeps the relationship strong, not to forget how important good relationship keeping is in business
Cutting Cost and Increasing Efficiency
Due to all the intermediate steps involved, the efforts will be scalable too, which will eventually add to the price of the final product, making the competition little more with the introduction of monetary aspects, in this case, all those extra-monstrous-cost are looked after by DMS
Saving on Time, the Biggest Asset for Advancement
When the processes are already taken care of well, then the officials of the company can utilize that time on planning, strategizing, improvising and innovating to maintain the position in the market-race and preparing to excel too
Easy Management of the Inventory
It’s very important to avoid the state of Overstocking and Understcoking for every business to not be in the state of debt or scarcity, thankfully we have an easy solution for this problem.
Controlling the Inter and Intra Procedure both
It’s equally important to monitor the steps inside a company as well as outside the company. Many times, the processes or data is corrupt inside the organization but it’s very hectic to figure out where the error has occurred and where everything can be monitored well through DMS
Benefits of Distribution Management System
So, far we have seen that how a business can be customized leading to high profits, increased efficiency and decreased errors/mistakes in the whole process. Let’s now see the overall and broader-aspected benefits of DMS and how it will produce the desired and optimized results.
Benefits based on the Distributors you are working with
As the process has different scaled distributors involved in the process, and the tracking is a no-easy thing, you will see here that how we can get the desired output without any hustle-bustle involved just using DMS
Small Scale Distributors
These are the distributors usually working on a small scale and usually found in the rural areas, for them, it’s very unusual to be very much organized because they don’t have adequate capital, tech tools, proper knowledge, and methodological ways. So, in this case, DMS takes care of all the deprived requirements well
Large Scale Distributor
As they have so much to deal with that many times the data get lost somewhere and the information gets distorted in the way which causes heavy losses to the business, here again, DMS plays the role to safeguard this arena
Multi-Brand Distributors
They are handling several brands and several products and hence the clutter is huge in this case. As there are so many brands to manage, the management itself is the major area to work upon for not letting the data get misplaced with different products or the manufacturers, and with the of DMS, we can check this box of requirement too
Benefits based on the location of the distribution to be made
Out of the 7.7 billion population living in the world, we have 3.4 billion living in the rural area and remaining in the urban, so to make a hit, both the locations have a major role to play, but here comes the limitation part too, so let’s see how we look into that with the help of DMS
Rural Areas: The rural areas are very much technology deprived and simultaneously the outstretch of the business has to reach the area, so there has to be a solution which can add a few levels between the manufacturer and Distributor, taking care of the technicalities which is difficult to manage for reduced cost and effective working. So, in this state, DMS takes care of all the deprived things that might be harmful in the longer run for your business
Urban Areas: In urban areas, distributors have to deal with many sellers at a time, distance and efforts are also at par, so the availability of the distributors become a problem many a time where effective communication isn’t established. Apart from this, with such huge work-load, we might lose some really potential clients, here DMS makes the work for such dealers easy
Benefits to out-check the lack of real-time data
Sometimes, the immediate data is the need and if couldn’t get access to that, we can’t fix many things and a good loss to bear. We need to know about the number of orders, inventory stock, the response of the customers, stockouts or overstock in the warehouse, which can be easily taken care of by DMS
Benefits based on the size of your business: This is one of the very key important parts of any business, the resources, the outreach, availability
Small Scale Business: Here, the employees are loaded with work-pressure due to the comparatively lesser number of resources than required and in this case, there are many things that get missed out in the array. To check on all the small components and making the process gliding well, DMS can be life-saviour for many here
Large Scale Business: When the business has a large number of employees with locations at multiple places, coordination and accountability is a big task for the smooth functioning of everything. For the firm accountability and various other factors, we need to synchronize with something, and with the help of DMS, we can easily establish that.
- Analytical Tools
- Schemes and Claims Management
- Integrated SFA
- Sales Tracking Capability at Primary, Secondary and Tertiary level
- Reduced overall sales realization & processing time
- Faster stock replenishment
- Minimal change management as distributors work on their existing Tally
- Multi-Brand Invoicing
- SKU Mapping