Inventory driven businesses are built upon the efficient management of their stock and materials with order fulfillment capability. Inventory-based businesses arguably represent the largest proportion of commercial enterprise and may represent the greatest diversity in regard to operation size.  That being said, the market for wholesale distribution software is equally diverse in terms of functionality requirements and IT budgeting.

Wholesale Distribution Software

specialized functionality amidst end-to-end ERP solutions

Small, medium and large sized businesses deal in wholesale distribution but the pockets that feed information technology are vastly divergent. True, the heavy hitters like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft make their presence known and have gobbled up large chunks of the big budget technology pie but that leaves a whole lot of businesses under serviced.  Equally true, is the fact that the software powerhouses have also recognized that there is money to be made in the markets that previously found their products and price tags to be a bad fit, but that has changed.

Different approached to meeting the software demands of all businesses have and continue to develop.  Oracle, SAP and Microsoft (to name a few) have recognized the business opportunities represented by small and mid-sized companies with budgets corresponding to their respective business sizes and have introduced SaaS (software as a service), cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) solutions.  SAP Business by Design, the Oracle E-business Suite and Microsoft Dynamics GP have been developed and are available to those companies not prepared to meet the extensive hardware build out and maintenance demands of traditional systems and wholesale distribution software.

Sage, Epicor, Infor, Intuit, Netsuite, are next in line to join the wholesale distribution software party. Widely divergent in type and scope these solutions come from developers of considerable size who view small and mid-sized businesses as their primary customers. The product offerings come in many shapes and sizes ranging from traditionally built systems to SaaS and subscription software solutions.

Some of the software listed here is licensed some is leased and some is subscription based. Sage and Infor are traditional systems without multinational capability. Changing technology has made SaaS the software delivery means of many ERP solutions with wholesale distribution software capabilities as a part of the over all software package.

With the big three now competing for market share, Epicor, Infor, Intuit, BatchMaster, Deacom and others rely on specialization to remain viable in the small to mid-size and specialty markets. For BatchMaster and Deacom, formula based manufacturing is the industry to which they cater and Epicor, Infor and Intuit use creative licensing and finance options and price points to retain and build customer base.  

All of these packages have one thing in common, however, the ability to interact with the Internet. The ability to interface electronically with other organizations is an absolute requirement of wholesale distribution software since the exchange of information is most important. Shipping data, inventory information and status updates now occur with lightening speed and the reliability of that data is the stuff that the wholesale distribution business is made of and an ERP without the ability to work with such data would not and could not fit the bill.