Wholesalers face margin pressure and growing digitisation pressure from B2B online platforms simultaneously. Roland Berger reports that roughly a quarter of digitising wholesalers see measurable profit improvement.
A technical wholesale distributor with 180 employees in North Rhine-Westphalia reduced order-processing time by 42 percent after its ERP gained direct connectivity to the B2B shop and to its main supplier portals.
Related terms: distribution and wholesale industry consulting, cost-saving wholesale ERP selection.
Three tests separate viable solutions from generic suites: first, the depth of variant-pricing logic; second, embedded warehouse management without a third-party system; third, native B2B portal capabilities for regular customers and field sales representatives.
Thinking from first principles, the question is not which vendor but which three margin basis points the system must defend. Functions that do not defend margin are cost drivers without effect.
List prices are rarely the real prices. Volume tiers, promotional pricing, customer discounts and seasonal conditions are frequently not modelled cleanly in lean ERP packages, and they then resurface as manual corrections in daily operations.
Read next: what is an ERP system.
To check which wholesale processes should really drive your ERP selection, book a scoping call.