Software4Distributors: October 2012

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Pronto Software Wins Deal with Herschend Family Entertainment

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) software provider, Pronto Software, announced today the signing of a new customer contract with Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation (HFE), the largest family-owned theme park company in the United States.

The multi-million dollar deal will see Pronto Software’s Pronto Xi ERP and BI software tool-set replace HFE’s legacy merchandise retail and inventory systems across HFE’s portfolio of entertainment, tourism and hospitality properties, including Silver Dollar City in Missouri and Dollywood in Tennessee.

The fully integrated solution includes financial, distribution, manufacturing, point-of-sale and warehouse management tools with built in business intelligence from IBM Cognos. The solution will help HFE control costs, improve operating efficiencies and profitability, while offering flexibility across multiple sites, staff teams and locations.

The implementation begins immediately and will be carried out through a series of rollouts over the next two years. On completion, HFE will become Pronto’s largest installed client in North America.

Read more on the Pronto website.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Monday, October 29, 2012

Why Is The Distribution Industry Growing Faster Than The Economy?

Revenues for industrial distributors increased 19.1 percent to $353.3 billion in 2011, and revenues are expected to grow 10.1 percent in 2012, according to financials from the Wholesale Distribution Economic Report.

Distributors often suggest issues are created when the manufacturers can sell directly to the customer, but this suggests distributors are actually getting a larger share of the business. Revenues of wholesale distributors grew by 13.2 percent to $4.7 trillion in 2011, with growth expected to grow by 6.8 percent in 2012.

Read more about the growth rates and forecasts on the Advanced Distribution Today blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Friday, October 26, 2012

SAP Announces Availability of SAP HANA Cloud, SAP NetWeaver Cloud

SAP today unveiled its plans for SAP HANA Cloud, a next-generation cloud platform based on breakthrough in-memory technology. As part of SAP HANA Cloud, the company also announced the general availability of SAP NetWeaver Cloud, an open standards-based application service.

SAP HANA Cloud will include several key offerings, two of which are the SAP HANA AppServices that aims to allow developers to create next-generation applications using native SAP HANA, Java and other rapid-development services; and SAP HANA DBServices aims to provide database-as-a-service in the cloud.

Read more about SAP HANA Cloud and SAP NetWeaver Cloud on the SAP blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

How Should Distributors Sell To The Tech-Savvy Customer?

Today’s tech-savvy customers don’t need a salesperson; they need a consultant. The challenge for the sales team is providing the customer with information that can’t be found on the Internet. You’re no longer a salesperson but an expert. You must teach the customer something new about their business. Customers want a salesperson who knows the business and has a deep understanding of their pain points and needs.

Read more on the Advanced Distribution Today blog...

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Monday, October 22, 2012

NetSuite’s Cloud ERP Assists Non-profits with Fund Accounting

Most nonprofits and NGOs must break down income and expenditures on a program-by-program basis, which means maintaining a distinct ledger for each operating fund. This can make accounting procedures between funds about as similar as balancing the books in Boise and Brazil.

The inherently complex accounting challenges nonprofits face require accounting systems that balance best practices with both power and flexibility. NetSuite.org, NetSuite’s Corporate Citizenship arm, is working to increase the suitability of their market-leading cloud ERP for nonprofit organizations.

NetSuite can offer a fund accounting solution which gives nonprofit organizations superior control over the balance sheet of any number of programs. With this platform, nonprofits can allocate costs on a percentage, hourly or fixed cost basis, with the freedom to configure different rules for each fund.

To read more about the features of NetSuite's Cloud ERP for nonprofits, visit the Cloud NetSuite blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Friday, October 19, 2012

3 Ways Manufacturers And Distributors Can Work Together Better

This article from The Electrical Distributor Magazine website shares insight from manufacturers on just how distributors can share in their mutually beneficial goal of improving sales.

The key is communication. Manufacturers rely on distributors to promote, demonstrate, sell and support their products. But whether it’s disagreements over inventory levels or the lack of technology adaptation, manufacturers want distributors to improve their service levels and become better partners to them.

Read more about the three improvement areas on the Advanced Distribution Today blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Are You Using Your ERP To Create Better Pricing?

When your salesperson goes in for a pitch, where does the pricing model come from? Instincts — or hard data?

Unfortunately, most companies rely on the former, letting sales reps’ knowledge of the market dictate the organization’s pricing. It’s a bad idea, according to an article on the Modern Distribution Management website. Companies should use their ERP systems to analyze the previous 12 months of transactions to segment customers, products and pricing sensitivity. Using big data analysis, management can determine how much a customer would be willing to pay for an item. That pricing information can be unlocked right from a distributor’s data — and turned into valuable, actionable knowledge the sales team and management can use.

Read more on the Advanced Distribution Today blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Monday, October 15, 2012

Manufacturing the Cloud: 2 Tier or Not 2 Tier...

Two-tier ERP is increasingly common among large and often multinational companies that have (or are adding) smaller and less complex business units. Rather than the massive time and expense of installing on-premise ERP at each distributed unit, they are deploying cloud ERP and synching it with the system in place at headquarters.

A number of NetSuite customers run two-tier ERP, realizing numerous benefits including cost savings, user adoption rates, accessibility, and configurability. Is the two-tier approach right for you? Read more on the NetSuite blog to find out.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Friday, October 12, 2012

NewSuite Announces Two-Tier ERP for Oracle

Global enterprises can run subsidiaries with NetSuite Cloud ERP while preserving headquarters' Oracle investments. NetSuite offers SuiteCloud Connect to integrate NetSuite Cloud ERP with Oracle for Global Enterprises.

The NetSuite cloud solution can be deployed in substantially less time and at substantially lower cost than a comparable on-premise ERP system at the subsidiary level, while providing real-time data, visibility and management through integration with the Oracle ERP solution in place at the corporate level. This two-tier ERP model is rapidly emerging as a compelling option for enterprises such as Qualcomm and Land O'Lakes, Inc. that need to support rapid global growth and gain greater efficiencies across key business processes without the time and cost burden of an on-premise deployment.

Read more on the NetSuite website.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Acumatica Cloud ERP Ranked Best in CRM for Small and Midsized Businesses

Acumatica, a leading provider of cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial software, announced today that its CRM Suite received top rankings across the board in Gleanster’s newest CRM for Small and Midsized Businesses benchmark report.

Gleanster’s Gleansight October 2012 report evaluated 35 CRM vendors in four categories: Ease of Deployment, Ease of Use, Features and Functionality, and Overall Value. The twelve top firms in each category were ranked from “Good” to “Better” to “Best.” Acumatica received “Best” rankings in all four categories, as indicated in the Vendor Rankings FLASH chart © Gleanster, October 2012.

Read more on the Acumatica website.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Monday, October 8, 2012

Why Distributors Need To Invest In E-commerce

Did you know that forty percent of distributors have no revenue from e-commerce — and almost 10 percent have no plans to enter the e-commerce market?

In the early phase of e-commerce, smaller companies could look and act like big companies online. But customers want more from e-commerce. The cost for such a great e-commerce experience is rising —and the smaller companies can’t keep up. With Amazon Supply coming onto the scene and converging business-to-consumer e-commerce with business-to-business e-commerce, it’s a smart move for distributors to invest in this area.

Read more on the Advanced Distribution Today blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Friday, October 5, 2012

3D Printing and the Manufacturing and Supply Chain

Manufacturing and Supply Chain Managers: You're next!

Outsourcing manufacturing to third parties eliminated the need for businesses to run their own factories. The next step is outsourcing manufacturing directly to customers. Factories will be a thing of the past. So will warehouses and inventory. When someone needs a physical object, the notion of “just in time” manufacturing will take on a whole new meaning; they’ll download a design and just make it themselves.

Affordable 3D printing is already putting small-scale factories directly into people’s offices and homes. Once everyone has a multipurpose factory in their living room, there’ll be a lot less need for fancy facilities.

Learn more about the future uses of 3D printing on the SAP on the Cloud blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Leading Your Company Through Strategic Planning

The notion of a serious planning effort means different things to different people. Does “strategic planning” conjure up the notion of military battle plans, mountaintop retreats, huge corporations or expensive consultants? How about a 2-day meeting with your top leaders, with good preparation and a strong commitment to fix what’s broken and come up with two or three ideas that will launch the company toward a “BHAG” (big hairy audacious goal)?

There are three essentials to getting your first (or renewed) strategic planning project started: get the leaders involved; create a rigorous process to explore new initiatives; execute the initiatives by building them into the way you do business.

Read more on the I.B.I.S. blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

Monday, October 1, 2012

3 Technology Trends Distributors Must Adopt

Being tech-savvy is important for distributors. As the economy improves, interest rates drop and businesses look into improving their lines of trade, more executives are replacing or updating their outdated ERP software. How can wholesale distributors tap into the latest technology trends? There are three developments they can take-on: cloud, big data, and adoption rates.

Read more on the Advanced Distribution Today blog.

The Brown Smith Wallace 2012 Mid-Year Supplements are available. Visit our website to download your copy!

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