JPlatform DMS | Distribution Management System for Small & Medium Business

Is your distribution business overstocking? Then it’s probably time to make positive changes to your inventory management. Businesses lose sight of the consequences of carrying more stock than is required, and this is a common folly among enterprises big and small. The all-too-obvious risk is that the amount you spend to store inventory just goes up. There are other pitfalls as well. As the expiration dates of these products draw near, depreciation kicks in, which means the value of these goods might take a big hit! Now for the worst part. Trends come and go, so goods held too long in storage, like, say, fashion wear, might have to be sold at a steep discount, junked, or handed to charities. So, a distribution management system is a must.  What if you choose to stock less? Keeping too little stock on hand or keeping the inventory levels as close to zero as possible can also be quite risky. In light of supply shortages and retail customer frustration resulting from such “lean inven...

Real household spending in India is getting back on track after two years of lowered spending amid lockdowns and public health measures necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Led by urban consumer demand, the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector in the country is seeing an upward growth trend.  Rural demand for FMCG is also showing signs of a major recovery. FMCG companies are going head-to-head to capture consumer wallet share, and the competition will only intensify in the short-to-medium term. Product quality is given in the sector, and most products deliver near-identical benefits.  So, FMCG brands can no longer hope to cut through the clutter and wow customers solely on the basis of product performance. Increasingly, these businesses are seeing speedier and cost-effective transportation and delivery of products as value propositions to attract customers. This has huge implications for distributors since it’s essentially their responsibility to take the brands faster t...

In markets like India, factory-made goods must cover long distances before they can reach display racks in various retail outlets scattered far and wide. Often, it’s a long and arduous journey involving a tangled network of distributors, warehouses, and logistics providers. Getting goods efficiently without interruptions from the manufacturing site to the point of sale is more an aspiration than a reality for a lot of manufacturers. That’s primarily because they still use spreadsheets in place of r etail distributed management systems, hoping to keep abreast of packing, delivery, storage, and distribution activities.  Of course, it might be tempting to use a spreadsheet instead of a distribution management solution since the former is inexpensive and has been around for quite a while. However, spreadsheets come with unavoidable copy-and-paste errors. With all the version control mechanisms in the application, managing inputs and changes from multiple field staff can be downright a...

True, inventory is the lifeblood of any distribution business. But how much inventory should a distributor carry at any point in time? That could have a measurable impact on a distribution business in terms of lost revenue as well as wasted time and effort. It is certainly tempting to fill your warehouse with excess inventory to avoid running out of items.  What if these go unsold for a long time, start to gather dust, eventually go bad, and have to be written off? Dead inventory represents a missed sales opportunity and tends to hemorrhage revenues of the distributor and everyone else in the supply chain. Just think of all the costs – production, logistics, storage – that have gone into unused inventory. An efficient distributor management system could have easily sorted all of this!  Overstocking not only eats away your margins but also results in frustrated retail customers since the store is filled with products they are less than keen about! At the same time, what they n...