Ask any entrepreneur running a small or medium business what he relies on as a comprehensive business tool, and 9 out of 10 are likely to say ERP.
Enterprise Resource Planning software centralizes all information in one database, giving you a real-time view into all your business processes.
A trading ERP like Tranquil can manage and sync activities like assembly, development, arranging, and so on from one unified database.
It includes all elements of the trading industry, from procurement and inventory to marketing and distribution to increase your overall efficiency and productivity, eventually improving your revenues.
While a trader does not have to keep track of multiple types of inventory like raw materials and work-in-progress, they are likely to have several thousand products, which can become very difficult to manage properly.
Each product will be of different value and have a different shelf life, and turnaround time.
Some products may also be seasonal. Manually keeping track of all this can be very daunting and chaotic.
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To be profitable, you must have a robust ERP solution, and be able to deliver products to your customers in time.
These are times of intense competition and uncertainties; of tightening regulations and dynamic consumer needs.
It is imperative for you to adapt to all these situations in the market, and achieve quality in products, and excellence in customer service.
As your business grows, you also need the sales team to draw up result-oriented sales strategies.
You must meet goals and accelerate business growth.
Let us see how trading ERP software can help you navigate the tempestuous modern business environment.
This feature helps you manage and keep track of customer orders efficiently.
The possibility of orders getting misplaced or duplicate orders being recorded used to be common when orders were recorded manually on paper.
Thanks to ERP and automated process of order management, these errors can be eliminated, and the entire process is made smoother and quicker.
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A trading ERP gives you excellent visibility into material flow in and out of the organization.
You can make more accurate market predictions and take informed decisions regarding inventory, procurement, production, and so on.
Distributors can also get the benefits of automated distribution processes and improved business insights from a robust ERP solution.
ERP software for trading offers robust warehouse management features that make sure that your warehouse processes are more efficient, productive, consistent, and are of good quality.
Trading ERP offers accurate business information in real-time by tracking customers, vendors, inventory, external and internal locations, and more; these factors allow warehouse managers and traders to make better decisions for profitability.
Thanks to a trading ERP solution, you can effectively handle incoming inventory and prepare inventory controls.
Supposing you have warehouses in several locations, a robust Trading ERP like Tranquil will smoothly handle the multiple locations, ensuring the inventory operations are transparent and hassle-free.
You can reduce the time needed to process the products, and boost employee productivity with the proper allocation of the appropriate resources at the correct time.
What’s more, Tranquil is designed to scale with your business; therefore, if your business grows and you jump to millions of transactions from a few thousand, the software will handle it without issues.
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Trading ERP solutions can help you trace your products meticulously; it also helps you trace all operations carried out between the vendor and customer.
Lot tracking, serial number tracking, activity log, and perpetual variation, are some of the features that the ERP offers – all this is achieved by diligently following the stock.
Serial numbers are assigned at all steps in the reception and delivery phases to facilitate easy and quick traceability.
Additionally, with just a click, it can also help to forecast all future inventory transactions.
In fact, a trading ERP helps in tracking stock movements to not just specific warehouses, but also to customers, suppliers, manufacturing locations, and so on.
A trading ERP analyzes every action taken with regarding to stock both up the chain and downwards, achieving complete traceability of products.
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It is important to manage your vendors efficiently, to ensure that you always have a smooth inflow of your quick-selling items.
Tranquil ERP maintains meticulous data on all your vendors, including things like their lead time (how much time it takes for a vendor to deliver your orders to you after your order), pricing, product quality, reliability, and so on.
This helps you to pick the right vendor when you have to order.
You will need to have a proper mix of local and national or international suppliers.
While the vendors who are far away are likely to offer lower prices, the local supplier will be able to deliver much quicker.
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Along with streamlining distribution processes, trading ERP provides effective forecasting capability for a business.
It leverages historical data, and factors in current market trends to make predictions regarding demands for the near future.
BI and data analysis capabilities of ERP trading software can help traders plan their inventory purchases much more efficiently and gain a competitive edge.
A robust trading ERP like Tranquil helps you manage the different types of products, kits, the numerous variants of a product, and different measurement units smoothly and without errors.
From receiving the products to picking, packing, shipping, and delivery, every trading operation can be speeded up thanks to technology like RFID, barcode scanners, touchscreen interface, and so on, integrated with the ERP.
As barcode scanners can be used to track products with serial numbers, you can save a great deal of time when it comes to resource management, and route customization for the delivery processes.
Tranquil ERP allows you the customization of routes, as well as the picking and packing operations to align with your specific customer delivery process.
Wave picking, batch picking, by-order picking, and most other picking methods are facilitated by Tranquil ERP.
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A trading industry works at different levels; from handling product inventories to delivering them to customers who order them, there are multiple segments of people in the various categories involved in processing the various steps involved in each phase.
A trading ERP system helps traders to streamline human resource management efficiently, handling everything in that function from hire to fire.
You can maintain a solid database to record every detail about your employees including contact information, their roles, and responsibilities, attendance, salary, performance evaluation, promotions, performance issues, disciplinary actions if any, loans, vacation days, sick leave, training undergone, and so on.
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By diligently tracking employee performance, the business can decide on matters like promotions, salary raises, training required, and so on.
The employee self-service portal allows employees to view important information related to their employment in the company, and can directly post queries, follow up with leave requests, and so on.
Tranquil also simplifies your payroll management, ensuring that employees are paid correctly and in time – happy employees are productive employees.
By offering them opportunities to upskill themselves through training, and making timely salary payments, you can help your employees feel valued.
Traders and distributors greatly benefit by the inventory management module in trading ERP systems.
By streamlining and automating inventory management processes, the potential for manual intervention and error can be significantly reduced.
Additionally, the business can save time, and divert the employee focus to more value-adding core business tasks.
With automation, businesses can supervise and manage data across multiple currencies and locations, offering actionable insights into real-time transit and stock inventory as at present.
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Thanks to the comprehensive and end-to-end visibility that Tranquil ERP provides, you can also generate reliable reports based on multiple categories.
You can also compile data and generate reports for internal use as well as external reasons.
This way, you can respond more quickly and efficiently to complicated requests for reports, and also ensure that you maintain compliance with industry regulations and requirements for reporting.
ERP trading software can help you build robust and long-lasting relationships with your customers.
As we saw above, Tranquil ERP helps in forecasting demand more accurately, planning procurement, inventory, and production more efficiently, and ensures that products are of good quality, and delivered to customers in time.
The software keeps track of past purchases by customers, enabling you to make tailored offerings to them.
All these factors go into increasing customer satisfaction.
This helps businesses retain customers and also gain new ones.
The sales module in Tranquil ERP helps you formulate more effective sales and pricing strategies, and deliver personalized buyer experiences to your customers.
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With customer habits of shopping changing quickly, it has become almost a stringent necessity for traders to include a point-of-sale or POS machine or facility for their products.
You can see them in retail stores near the exit and/or billing counters.
Many customers are attracted to purchase at specific outlets as POS machines are there and they can pay by credit or debit card even if they are not carrying cash.
POS is easily integrated with Tranquil ERP, and you can give the satisfaction of increasing purchasing ability to customers.
You can also use this opportunity to upsell and cross-sell products and bring in more revenue.
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Here are some of the unique features of ERP in Trading and Distribution Industries in brief:
So, we can see that an ERP solution can benefit your trading business significantly.
Tranquil ERP is a scalable, flexible, cloud-based solution that gets rid of siloed information and integrates disparate systems to render your processes more efficient than before. Every day without Tranquil ERP is a day you’ve not leveraged time and cost savings, and continued with less efficient processes. Contact us now for a free demo – and you’ll know what you’ve been missing.