Key Requirements for the Electrical Distribution Industry and how Infor and iCepts Technology Group Supports Them:
• Pricing: Providing the right price is critical for electrical distributors. Advanced Enterprise capabilities including Multiple Price/Rebate Types and Velocity Pricing Modifier provide electrical distributors the tools needed for a flexible pricing strategy. Business (SX.e)’s integration to epaCUBE’s Gross Profit Optimization solution provides customer “Cost to Serve” calculations, customer product price sensitivity, and other product segmentation information to suggest the ‘Right Product Price by Customer’ to increase gross margin.
• Large Amount of Product Data: Electrical distributors sell a very large number of individual products and must be able to efficiently and consistently order non-stocks from their vendors. Many electrical distributors get their data from Trade Service, which aggregates product and pricing information from electrical suppliers into a common format and provides it for a fee to distributors. Managing new products, product updates and price changes is complex and time-consuming. The integrated solution to epaCUBE’s Product Data Management Suite provides the necessary data cleansing, synchronizing and data mapping capabilities our customers need to manage this large volume of data. This solution will cleanse, merge, match, and cross-reference items from multiple systems, ensuring your product information is accurate and up-to-date. When data is imported from Trade Service, once cleansed, it is added to both Business (SX.e) and the Storefront database to allow for consistent and accurate selling of these products to customers and sourcing the products from vendors.
• Efficient Buying: Keeping inventory costs down is critical. The Buyer’s Control Center from Business (SX.e) provides your buyers one central location from which to make decisions about what to buy. Once in the Buyer’s Control Center, everything you need to know to make an intelligent purchasing decision is right at your fingertips.
• Increasing Margins: Electrical distributors operate at a very low margin. With Business (SX.e) warnings are issued during order entry if a margin is outside tolerances established for that type of product. This can also trigger an alert to a branch manager or sales manager. An order outside tolerances can also put it on margin hold. After shipping and before invoicing the user has the ability to review the sales order’s margin and amend the selling prices if needed. Looking for ways to reduce costs is a top priority for every electrical distributor. epaCUBE offers a Gross Profit Optimization suite that can help you cut costs, optimize pricing and capture lost margins with superior data visibility and modeling. Whether you’re creating “what if” scenarios to understand the impact of price changes or modeling the future impact of cost changes on your gross margin and pricing, you gain better analysis to guide your choices before enacting changes in your Infor Distribution solution.
• Kitting: Competitive pressures have forced electrical distributors to explore new methods of staying profitable. Finding fresh ways to package and market a product is one way to stay ahead. Trying to handle kits sales and production without a system designed for the task can be a challenge. The Kit Production module from Business (SX.e) supports pre-built, build-on-demand and build-on-the-fly kit processing.
• Job Management: Electrical distributors need tools to manage their customers’ long-term jobs. The Job Management solution simplifies contract jobs by automating the bidding, awarding, billing maintenance, and tracking procedures.
• Wire: Managing large spools of wire is a challenge for electrical distributors. Business (SX.e) provides visibility in Order Entry to lot-controlled spools to ensure the length requested is available. Total Warehouse Logistics (TWL) supports lot controlled inventory, including the ability to store multiple lots in a single location, providing the distributor more flexibility in managing spools of wire.
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Infor10 Distribution Business (SX.e) Product Roadmap for the Electrical Distribution Industry Page Copyright© 2012. Infor. All rights reserved. Updated 2-10-2012_V2