The wholesale distribution businesses link manufacturers with retailers play a crucial role in driving growth for both industries. The increasing costs of raw materials and goods transport make a big impact on the manufacturing cost as well as the retail pricing and availability of products for the consumers. On the other hand, smooth distribution channels ensure seamless business operation and a better Business 2 Business transaction. The well-acclaimed ERP system for wholesale businesses brings the promise of business process automation with a variety of modules and features.
The all-new NetSuite 2022.1 release further offered wholesale distributors more efficiency-driven features and tools to meet the demands of business process automation. The new NetSuite version with the help of expert NetSuite integration services can help optimise the inventory to streamline the sales process and reduce costs. NetSuite 2022 Release 1 comes as the most well equipped NetSuite version to boost the efficiency of the supply chain and cross-channel sales processes.
Here we are going to explain how NetSuite wholesale distribution after this latest release is going to add more value to the business process automation.
Making Warehouses More Efficient
The new NetSuite release comes with a new warehousing feature to help warehouse employees choose either pounds or kilograms as the weighing metric for packages. Moreover, the new version will allow employees to check the instructions for packaging goods before making the order ready for delivery. Now the new feature will also allow warehouse staff to pack the “Ship As Is” goods in bulk volumes. Like earlier, they no longer need to choose “Ship As Is” for packaging every single item.
These features will further make warehouse automation easier. Any leading NetSuite implementation consultant had to advise regarding the use of the NetSuite Warehouse Management System (WMS) module for distribution businesses. Now the latest WMS version comes with a lot of value-added support such as zone-specific picking to address the particular requirements for each zone.
On top of all these, the new WMS version now can take note of all items just at the same time when they go through scanning. This streamlines the entire process by reducing the step of cycle counting. As additional functionality, the new version also allows releasing and printing levels just by simple commands sent from the smartphones. The entire process goes paperless now and the managers can track every step through detailed visuals of the orders. The warehouse management NetSuite new version handles is likely to reduce stress on the staff while minimising errors and faulty duplicate pickings.
Robust Supply Chain Management Solution
NetSuite development services are often flooded with queries from businesses for customising their supply chain management module as per the specific needs and constraints. Now thanks to the new release of the NetSuite version the supply chain managers can produce custom views of the entire supply chain plan showcasing the supply and orders in an easily graspable graphic format.
The visual of the supply chain planning also allows using multiple filters like the location of the items and the preferred supplier for each item. Through the same visual report, you can also access the product description easily besides having a closer understanding of the safety stock and vendor details. Thanks to these details for every order shown in a graphic format, supply chain managers can easily assess the right order quantity and avoid instances of stock shortage or overflowing of stocks.
Read More: Supply Chain Management In 2024: An Overview Guide
More Data-Driven And Accurate Purchases
In every manufacturing company, making the right amount of raw material purchases without going low in stock or excess in stock is crucial to boost efficiency and misuse of the investment.
In this respect, the new NetSuite comes with a great feature to categorise vendors based on their performance scores. The feature helps evaluate the vendors and the time taken by them to fulfil orders before actually placing the order. The score is given to each vendor based upon the historical supply performance and hence is very helpful in making accurate choices of suppliers in times of need.
Preventing Inventory Wastage
The distributors before finalising the orders often need to check the quality of many goods. For this, the new NetSuite version brings on the table a much-improved inspection on-demand feature with the existing NetSuite Quality Management so that these inspections can be carried out in time, whether on an ad-hoc basis, on time or in a repetitive manner.
The new feature through timely and scheduled inspection of goods in certain industries will reduce inventory wastage to a great extent. The same feature can also play a crucial role in checking the obsolete items so that they do not continue to consume inventory resources. The new NetSuite version introduces now First Expired, First Out (FEFO) method to check and optimise inventory. This ensures selling the oldest items first so that they don’t risk losing their market value.
Read More: 2022’s Most Demanded Beginner’s Inventory Forecasting Guide
Tracking the Cash Flow Continuously
For distribution businesses maintaining consistent cash flow happens to be an area of crucial concern. NetSuite consultants are often hired by the manufacturers and distributors for tips to maintain their cash flow. The new NetSuite 2022 Release 1 release for these businesses now brings the Cash 360 module. This new module will help the finance professionals to track their cash balance in real-time besides having a comprehensive view of AP, AR and half-yearly forecast on the cash flow. The best thing is, all of these are easily accessible through a consolidated NetSuite dashboard.
Getting access to all financial and accounting data in just one place is highly effective for any manufacturer or distribution business. The accounting and finance teams of the distributor company can also add multiple financial events such as the purchase of assets, loans and receivables and showcase them in just one dashboard.
Improving Employee Retention Rate
Since the reports after implementing the new NetSuite version are likely to be more intuitive, encompassing and multifaceted leaving little room for adding any information layer, employees find everything they need to run the business more efficiently than ever before. This along with transparent goal tracking will engage more employees resulting in more employee retention.
The SuitePeople Performance Management module also got several key enhancements as the irrelevant and invalidated goals can be dropped by the employees. The new update also provides a robust manager digest feature to show how far the performance of each employee is behind or ahead of the goal.
The new SuitePeople Advanced Scheduling also allows scheduling the performance reviews of each employee with ease. No longer do the managers need to schedule reviews manually. The performance data of all employees in different roles and responsibilities are automatically updated and sent to the managers for evaluation through the managers digest feature.
Decision-Making Accuracy Get Better
The distributors are now capable of utilising the powerful NetSuite analytics module more effectively thanks to the new value addition called NetSuite Analytics Warehouse. The new analytics module coming with the latest NetSuite release offers as many as 18 additional types of transactions along with 6 different types of dashboards.
The new module also offers pré-configured historical datasets to produce expense reports, work orders and inventory reports more easily and accurately. There is also a value-added analytics interface called SuiteAnalytics Workbook allowing linking of a variety of datasets. This single and consolidated data source is likely to help business analysis and decision making in a never-before manner.
Conclusion
NetSuite 2022 Release 1 offered several key-value additions in the form of enhancements and new features for every industry. For the wholesale distribution businesses and all enterprises relying heavily on vendors, the new NetSuite release brought a gamut of useful features and sought after capabilities. These value additions further cemented the reputation of NetSuite as the most well equipped ERP automation system.
