Quality is the elusive goal many companies seek, but it is difficult to achieve. The costs of analysis, review and tighter management tend to drive businesses away from seeking quality, and lead to pursuit of value (quality and costs), or just being an industry leader in price wars. With the right distribution software, quality is attainable for small and medium distribution companies.
The quality mindset continually studies your systems, processes and results and seeks to find areas to improve. As improvements are applied, the quality mindset continues to review and apply strategic changes to improve.
The right distribution software will increase quality through the following four ways:
- Information – Distribution affects all aspects of your business. If your product/service is not distributed to the right people, you will not get customers. If distribution is done poorly with bad timing, you lose customers. If you have the right information, including tracking your distribution, keeping track of inventory in each location, knowing customer reorder rates and more give you the tools to increase quality.
- Warehouse Management System (WMS) – Surprisingly, managing inventory in the warehouse is still a manual process for most business. By utilizing a WMS, a distribution company can control the movement and storage of inventory. A WMS will not only improve quality but increase efficiency at the same time.
- Event triggers – Reordering product, identifying slow-moving products, and organizing warehouses are all events that can be predicted mathematically. The right software will give your management and employees’ objective means to decide and act. The objective triggers decrease human error and increase quality.
- Communication – The right distribution software facilitates communication between vendors, customers, and shareholders. Reporting functions, user accounts, and automatic responses all create more communication. Communication is key to building a quality process and the right distribution software will increase communication while reducing costs.
Businesses who desire to increase quality in their distribution processes can do so easily with many of the different distribution, customer management and enterprise resource software solutions that MaxQ. For information on how our systems can improve your quality processes, please contact us.