Wholesalers / Distributors: How We Can Help

Good sales and marketing plans, combined with the proper cost controls, will equal ever-rising profits for a well-managed wholesale/distribution company.  International Development Services can play a very important supportive role, helping you to better examine your company in the following important areas:  delivery and administration, sales and marketing, purchasing, inventory, and all matters concerning the warehouse.

International Development Services will provide you with the systems that are needed for you to control operating expenses.  By lowering your costs, you will produce higher profits, but you must actively put together a plan to accomplish these goals.  We are the company to help you develop a plan to attain greater profitability.  International Development Services puts systems in place to bolster your profits.  International Development Services facilitates all the elements needed to produce higher profit margins, including:

Sales and Marketing

• You need a solid foundation for your sales team, which will include the right criteria in the selection of your sales representatives. In addition, sales reps need proper training, defined territories and a compensation plan, which rewards productivity;
• You will also need systems that can tell you the profitability of products, accounts, individual sales reps; by account, product line, product, sales rep, and by product order history. We can build all the systems that you need to measure and manage your inventory;
• Do you have a plan for regularly scheduled reviews of your product lines to make profitable decisions for the future on what to drop and what to add.

Purchasing

• Every business owner needs clear-cut policies, which define both the authority and the responsibility of those involved in purchasing to prevent costly duplications and omissions;
• Do you have the systems needed to maximize coordination starting with sales forecasting? Do you have a way to track back through purchasing and inventory control to assure optimum inventory turn?  We can help with the systems necessary to ensure minimum dollar inventory investment, while also helping you provide good customer service;
• Access to all the needed vendors to insure that you are stocking the most wanted items, at the lowest costs.

Inventory Controls

• It is essential to have inventory levels that are established properly to take seasonal variations into account;
• Do you have the right procedures to minimize your exposure to capital tie-up by accumulating obsolete, or slow-moving, items, taking up valuable space when other more profitable items could be stocked and turned?

Warehouse Review

• When was the last time that you conducted a comprehensive review of your layout design to determine if you can achieve a straight-line flow from order to shipment?
• Have you recently reviewed your security measures to keep pilferage at a minimum?
• Have you implemented the proper training and tools to ensure warehouse supervisors do their jobs right?

Delivery Issues to Reduce Costs

• When was the last time that you had a study of driver routes to ensure that they are scheduled to maximize time spent servicing customers, seeking new customers, while minimizing costly time driving aimlessly?
• Do you have the best practices for controlling maintenance and repair costs?
• Do you have effective controls in place for the loading and unloading of products to prevent pilferage and shrinkage?

Administrative Functions

• Authority and responsibility of key people must be defined clearly;
• Management must have the necessary information to measure employee performance;
• Office procedures must be streamlined to minimize costs;
• Are your credit and collection policies sound by standards of today?