In simple terms, the best way to increase your drinks business’ profitability is to increase the amount of money that you bring in, while reducing costs and waste. If this was as simple as it sounds, every drinks business owner would be rolling in their profits on a monthly basis.
Luckily for you, Gaina Software is here to give you the information that you need on how ERP software can make your business dreams a reality!
Increase Profits With ERP Software For Your Wholesale Business
1 – Give sales reps the tools they need to succeed
Are your sales reps still using a paper and pen to take orders? Are they still spending dozens of hours on the phone to your office staff every month to ring in those orders? Get with the times and equip your team with the only mobile sales app designed by drinks industry professionals.
Ensure that orders meet and exceed pre-agreed profit and margin thresholds. Give your reps access to information on customer store type and historical purchasing trends. Take pens and paper out of the equation and reduce order errors.
Gaina Software’s ORCA app is perfect for analysing sales data in relation to products, customer types and locations. ORCA enables your reps to offer the right product at the right price, to the right customer.
2 – Decrease cost per sale and increase profits with a B2B web portal
As stated earlier, sales reps spend dozens of hours every month on phone calls to your office staff. An industry average of 29 hours per month, per rep. This wastes time, money and resources.
Gaina Software’s B2B web portal enables your customers to complete orders online without the need for your reps to visit them as often. Customers can access their account information without the need to call your office.
And you can target specific customers with targeted promotions, therefore increasing engagement and sales margins. Introduce new products to customers and enable them to order from anywhere, at any time. Cost goes down. Profit goes up.
3 – Improve cash flow with prompt payment rewards
Chasing customers for payments can be a nightmare. Your staff can spend several hours every day chasing money, arranging for payments to be collected and reconciling payments.
With Gaina Software, all of these tasks can be automated, therefore saving your staff time, saving money on postage and helping to track the speed at which individual customers pay for their orders. With this tracking, our financial ledgers offer you the flexibility to reward prompt payments with financial incentives, such as discounting, free products or specific promotions.
Not only will these types of incentives result in quicker payments, but can increase engagement and order volumes and value.
4 – Use vacant warehouse space and create another commercial channel
With Gaina Software’s demand planning and warehouse mapping software, you’ll see your stock regularly sit at its optimum levels. What does this mean?
This means that you’re using up less warehouse space, you’re saving money by not buying unnecessary stock, and if you’re using our bonded warehousing software, you’re also reducing your advanced purchasing costs. But that’s not all…
Several of our existing customers have noticed such improvements and quickly identified another financial and business opportunity. They started to rent out warehouse space to partners, and even competitors! You could too!
5 – Trade Promotions Management
We’ve touched on this briefly, but let’s take a glance at how you can better manage your promotions with Gaina Software’s ERP system.
The critical function here is the ability to report on and control your promotions. A supplier could extend £50,000 worth of discounts to allow you to run a promotion, but due to retrospective reporting and an inability to visualise live data, trade promotions can end up costing you too much money and running at a loss. Not with our Business Intelligence tool.
With Business Intelligence, you can see live sales data and live financial ledger information, meaning that your promotions never over-run. You can trust your data’s accuracy on your centralised ERP system. Business Intelligence ensures that you only run profitable promotions to targeted customers in specific outlets and locations.
You can control these promotions and then measure their effectiveness with state-of-the-art reporting tools.
A successful promotion today results in repeat custom tomorrow!
Reduce Costs With ERP Software For Your Wholesale Business
1 – In 2018, one Gaina Customer saved £80,000 with our demand planning software
In 2018, one Gaina Software customer saved £80,000 by utilising our Demand Planning tools. Our software can to optimise your stock levels across multiple warehouses. We enable you to look at historic information relating to monthly and seasonal trends, and our Business Intelligence tool enables reliable forecasting for the months and year ahead.
One result of using our demand planning tools has been customers having less stock in their warehouses. We’ve also eliminated the need for customers to run promotions on products that sat in their warehouses for lengthy periods of time and approached their ‘sell by’ dates, that result in financial losses.
2 – Reduce costly returns
Many drinks businesses around the UK and Ireland still rely on Excel spreadsheets. Did you know that these spreadsheets contain an average error rate of 29%? Double entry from multiple departments and orders taken on paper can lead to the incorrect order being placed in your warehouse, and the incorrect order being delivered to a customer.
Not only can this lead to customer discontent, but you could be spending tens of thousands of pounds on goods being redelivered, collecting previous orders, and then wasting more time in your warehouse to track and stack products that are coming back in.
Our ERP software reduces errors made in the ordering stage by offering a mobile sales app that sends an order straight into your main database, eliminating the need for manual entry and minimising human intervention in the order process. Electronic and automated order flows ensure that returns are reduced, that money is saved and that your staff’s time is freed up.
3 – Determine all spend with work-flow monitoring across ledgers
Larger organisations with silo’d departments can often lose track of spend and can find it hard to monitor budgets. Financial planning can become increasingly difficult. With manual reporting, decision makers may not get the information that they need at the time they need it.
Gaina Software’s financial ledgers and work-flow monitoring ensure monetary transparency across your company. Finance managers can assign budgets, monitor credit availability to customers and measure the exact return on every investment at the click of a button.
Gaina Software’s Business Intelligence tools offer real time data and automated reporting that delivers an accurate view of business activities for strategic decision making. Financial losses can be halted sooner with real time data.
4 – Mis-picks
Anyone who has worked in a bar, off sales or warehouse will tell you that a lot of the packaging that wine comes in looks identical. It’s easy to mistake your Shiraz for Merlot. Human error can cost your business tens of thousands of pounds per year. Your staff having to search through your warehouse for goods and pallets can waste dozens of hours per week.
Not with Gaina Software.
Our ERP software enables you track every good entering your warehouse, and every movement once it’s there. Our warehouse mapping tools enables you to find goods in seconds rather than minutes. RF scanning ensures that you don’t select a crate of Merlot instead of Shiraz! Your staff and finances will love our warehouse management software!
5 – Eliminate loss-making rep orders
We’ve previously discussed our mobile sales app, but there’s a function that we want to stress the importance of, and that’s the Profit Indicator. When we were building our app, we wanted customers to save time on the phone and in the office, and to help increase sales volumes.
However, our decades of experience in the drinks market identified flaws in how many drinks companies paid commission to their reps. Volume was key. But volume doesn’t generate profit. Volume is a vanity metric and can lead to profit losses when it is prioritised above profitability.
So, we developed the Profit Indicator. The Profit Indicator shows a running profit margin of an order as a rep collates it on their device! They still have the flexibility to offer discounts where applicable, but only if the order still reaches a pre-agreed profit threshold. The Profit Indicator has enabled existing customers to eliminate order losses and revolutionise how they pay commission to their reps.
Case Study
Originally known as Britvic Licensed Wholesale Ltd., the company was relaunched as Counterpoint Ireland (Counterpoint) in 2013. Gaina Software was selected as their IT partner of choice to deliver an end-to-end suite of technology to support the launch of their new business. Since then, the organisation has doubled in size, adding staff and customers.
It has amassed €80 million in revenues and has 4000 client accounts on its books.
“The amount of data within the system is extensive and useful, and the system itself is very user-friendly. We couldn’t live without the data we can export out of our main system.
I can take any information out of it. Whether that is historical sales, pricing, daily order comparison, so that we can report and monitor business performance. “ Niamh Duffy, Customer Care Manager, Counterpoint
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