Page 3 - Keeping the Spark

Electrical wholesale is often a commodity driven marketplace.
The value you bring is your industry knowledge, turnaround
times, keen pricing and the high levels of customer service you
offer. But as you’ve grown you’ve probably taken on a range
of different systems and processes that are loosely glued
together. They don’t provide your business with the real-time,
company-wide insights, control and automation you need to
excel in the current digital landscape. Your people may spend
much of their time working outside your business software
system to serve your customers well or lots of knowledge could
be locked inside the heads of your employees and is not easily
transferable.
Moving your business onto a modern digital technology
platform (such as an electrical wholesale ERP solution) can
bring many benefits to you around mobility, efficiency, control
and visibility. But in last year’s EDA survey, wholesalers’ #1
concern was the emergence of disruptive online competitors.
So how can ERP help with this? How can it help your business
retain and bolster the high customer service levels it is
renowned for? Can it prevent a service ethos from becoming a
redundant quality online?
Consider how your best customer facing operatives work. They
seem to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of which are the
best products, an almost sixth sense for what you have in stock,
and a natural ability for putting a deal together for an individual
customer. How do you replicate that customer experience you
are so proud of in the online world, while retaining margins?
The answer is to provide a complete digital offering driven by
your ERP software that allows you to reach more customers
(online) and to improve the ways in which your existing
customers can trade with you (online, mobile). With your online
presence underpinned by the same high-quality product data
held in your software it creates consistent quotes, stock checks
and easy order entry. It also drives offline benefits too. The
automation opportunities it affords frees up time for your
customer facing staff so that they can better serve trade-
counter customers, and spend more time seeking out new
business.
Ultimately to compete in the digital age, your technology needs
to be an enabler, and needs to be configured so that customers
can self-serve, self-inform and digitally engage with your team.