6 Cool Ideas for Distribution Companies

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Distributor sales rep
These days, with increasing frequency, your sales reps spend less time in the office tied to a desktop PC, and more time out and about—building relationships, and hopefully closing new deals for your distribution business. Have you given much thought to how well equipped your sales reps are—or are not—with mobile resources? Do they have access to the information they need? Are they prepared to anticipate and attend to the needs of customers and prospects? And can they do these things with the confidence and accuracy needed to win their trust, and ultimately—loyalty to your brand?

The key to more sales and happier customers could be sitting right in your sales person’s pocket. It can be as simple as taking advantage of the great mobile sales solutions available to distributors and manufacturers today. Think about it. If your sales reps are going to leave the office with just one tool in their pockets, shouldn’t it be one that provides information to make their lives—and your business—better?

Let’s look at 6 cool ideas for distribution companies -  specific things you can do for your sales reps to improve their performance:

  1. Provide downloadable and dynamic access to customer information and contact details. Not only do new sales reps normally have to manually enter all these details themselves—names, addresses, multiple contacts, phone numbers, email addresses and on and on—but they have to maintain them too. Let’s be realistic. Relying on manual updates, how accurate and complete will that data be over time?
    A good mobile sales app will allow you to distribute all the customer and contact info directly to the smart phone with only a login and a password. If you follow best practices, that information will be maintained in your back office ERP/CRM/accounting system. That way, you’ll never have another worry about whether your rep has accurate contact information to always be connected to your customers.
  2. While you’re at it, give them dynamic inventory access, too. This is especially useful if you can provide visibility by warehouse, and differentiate between quantity on hand and quantity available. If your inventory has visual appeal and your mobile app can display images, you’re on the path to eliminating those expensive, never current product catalogs you’re still publishing.
  3. Equip them with historical sales information. Do you want to convey to your customer that you DON’T care for them? Then make sure your sales reps are not able to recite what the customer has purchased from them throughout time—when and at what price. But if it’s informed sales reps you want, mobile access to sales history is vital.
  4. Let them enter their own orders. Does your sales process require making a call, or filling out an order form that’s faxed to the office to be rekeyed by someone else? If so, congratulations because by enabling a mobile sales app that allows for transaction entry will save you boat loads of administrative labor, and will get the orders placed, picked, and delivered faster. This will also eliminate all kinds of errors.
  5. Empower sales reps to accept payments, too. Even if your long-standing distributor relationship leads you to grant 30-day payment terms, perhaps a change is in order. The culture of immediacy of all things consumer apps (especially as millennials flood the workforce) may be reason to rethink payment collection. Let’s face it, no one wants a paper check. No one wants a paper invoice.
    And while you’re not likely to be accepting Bitcoin, swiping a credit card may become the new normal. If your business model includes selling at tradeshows, from a sales counter, or a showroom floor—taking payment directly on your smart phone or tablet could both delight your customer, accelerate your cash flow—and provides yet another opportunity to save on administrative costs.
  6. Have sales reps collect new intelligence. I see a lot of businesses scrambling to find the latest, greatest business intelligence tools. They seek the latest dashboard, the most meaningful pivot table, the easiest-to-use query. What I don’t often see is companies evaluating the nature of the information they collect.
    Mobile apps and smart phones are naturals for gathering survey information of any kind. That could be customer, competitor, sales rep, or vehicle data. You name it. Mobile apps also leverage a wide range of tools your smart phone or tablet affords, allowing you to collect photos, other images, videos, audio notes, electronic signatures, and even location-centric (GPS) data.

There are a number of important considerations before investing in a mobile sales app. However, as you can see—there is opportunity-a-plenty to stand out in your industry as the most informed, up-to-date, confident, efficient and modern distribution/manufacturing business. How cool is that?

Other resources distributors may be interested in:

Ready to build your own mobile sales strategy?  We’d love to hear from you. Email us at info@xkzero.com, visit www.xkzero.com, or call 847-416-2009.

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7 New Ways to Empower Sales with Mobile ERP

Not too cold, not too hotbut just right. Not too hard, not too softbut just right. You’ve got to hand it to Goldilocks. She definitely knew what she wantedand what she didn’t want.

Some business owners hesitate equipping their teams with mobile sales apps, due to the belief that they have little or no control over sensitive ERP system data that may not be appropriate or even useful for the intended user. For example, some mobile sales apps provide access to too much inventory data, while some include too little data. With iSales 100 for Sage 100 ERP, we think xkzero gets it just right.

With iSales 100, business owners and sales managers can rest easy knowing that sensitive or potentially misleading inventory information will not get into the wrong hands. This is because iSales 100 can be quickly configured to empower your sales and customer service teams with the exact information needed–no more and no less–to be highly productive in the field.

You create individual user experiences for each person on your team by controlling the amount of information you publish on the app. Here are 7 great ways to limit data access per user, based on inventory rules built right into Sage 100 ERP:

  1. Filter by Warehouse
  2. Hide Pricing
  3. Hide Warehouse Quantities
  4. Purchase History: choose how far back in time
  5. Manage by Item Type: Internet only, regular items, miscellaneous charges, comments, miscellaneous items, finished goods, kits, raw materials, or discontinued
  6. Quantity Restrictions: omit based on zero on-Hand or zero-available
  7. Scanning Options: alias item number, customer alias or vendor alias

As an added bonus, iSales 100 even allows you to display up to 8 additional fields of your choice from the inventory item master file, including user defined fields (UDFs).

These filters can be applied to a specific user and company. Doing so could not be easier, as we built the check boxes and selections directly into familiar territoryyour Sage 100 ERP system. The two screen shots below illustrate how quickly and easily these settings can be made in “Remote User Maintenance,” within the native integration module included with iSales 100.

Item selections 1

Item selections 2

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At xkzero, we believe that people perform best when they are confident, informed, and have a high level of trust in the tools they use. Maybe it’s time for your wholesale distribution business to start gearing up with mobile apps. If your ERP data tells the story of your customers and your inventory, shouldn’t you equip your team to have that information in their pockets?

Contact us at info@xkzero.com or 847-416-2009, we can help you create a mobile plan that works for you.

How to Hide Price and/or Quantity Info with iSales 100

There are a lot of reasons you may wish to disable inventory item pricing or quantity information on your iSales 100 mobile sales app for Sage 100 ERP. One example– you may want to provide your distribution business customers with an app (instead of a web portal) to inquire about their account. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean you wish to share pricing or available quantities, because (unfortunately) that information can be used against you.

Here are the steps to disable inventory information:

  1. On your computer
    Go to: Sage 100 ERP> xkzero Web Services> Set-up> Remote User Maintenance
    Select: User (User is “DEMO” in the illustration below).
    On the [1. User] tab, in the bottom right panel, check either or both of the appropriate boxes.
  2. On your mobile device
    Open iSales 100.
    Synchronize all data.

You’re all set.

 

items no price

 

At xkzero, we believe that people perform best when they are confident, informed, and have a high level of trust in the tools they use. Maybe it’s time for your wholesale distribution business to start gearing up with mobile apps. If your ERP data tells the story of your customers and your inventory, shouldn’t you equip your team to have that information in their pockets?

Contact us at info@xkzero.com or 847-416-2009, we can help you create a mobile plan that works for you.

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Setting Up & Accessing Inventory from Sage 100 ERP with Mobile Sales

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[Updated from original post of December 2013 to include new features.]

No more need to lug around heavy and outdated product catalogs. With Sage 100 ERP and iSales 100 by xkzero, confidently identify and make commitments about inventory from an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

The video below shows how to quickly assign only the inventory items or groups of items to access from out of the officeall managed natively in Sage 100 ERP, and
accessed from iSales 100. iSales 100 is native for the Apple mobile devices, meaning the data can be accessed any place, even without Internet connectivity. Beware, however, that quantity, pricing and other information are only as current as the most recent data synchronization.

In the latest version of iSales 100, we’ve expanded even further the ability to filter the inventory information visible on the mobile device. As shown in the image below, there are now options to filter by item type (Internet items only, regular items, miscellaneous charges, miscellaneous items and comments) and warehouse code, and to exclude “zero on-hand” and/or “zero available” items.

For more information about how you can grow your business by going mobile with Sage ERP, contact us at info@xkzero.com, or call 847-416-2009. And don’t forget to download iSales 100 from the Apple app store or off our website at http://www.xkzero.com/mobility/

Infinite Peripherals: Streamlining Warehouse Operations with Mobile Devices

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xkzero Technical Services featured client solution:
Infinite Peripherals

Infinite Peripherals provides mobile point of sale (POS) devices to 30% of the top 20 U.S. retailers. As the premier manufacturer of mobile scanning, printing and payment swipe devices for Apple, Infinite Peripherals once had slow, paper-based manual warehouse processes that didn’t integrate with their Sage 100 ERP. As the products began to proliferate in the marketplace, the management team knew that to keep up with the continued demand, they needed better solutions.

Here is the story of why the company decided to hire xkzero to create customized software to meet the challenge, and also add some of its existing iOS apps into the mix. In the article below, “Streamlining Warehouse Operations with Mobile Devices,” originally published in July 2014 on the web site The BarCode News, Infinite Peripherals President Andy Graham writes about the partnership’s positive impact on operations.

Please note the bold, italicized text interspersed throughout the story below, and the introductory paragraph above was not included in the original article. It represents commentary by xkzero team members, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Infinite Peripherals.

In 2009, as Infinite Peripherals, Inc. (IPC) entered the mobile POS industry with its Linea Pro® (the first-to-market iOS peripheral), the company began experiencing significant growth and business opportunities. With increasing adoption of mPOS over the years, IPC rapidly expanded, outgrowing its warehouse and internal data systems to manage increasing inventory and order flow.

After six years in its former offices in Arlington Heights, Ill., IPC moved in December 2013 to a new corporate headquarters in Elk Grove Village, Ill. At 25,000 square feet, the new office and warehouse are triple the company’s former space, and are located in an industrial park minutes from O’Hare International Airport, through which most of the company’s products are shipped, as well as easily accessible from downtown Chicago.

Infinite Peripherals runs Sage 100 ERP to manage the wholesale distribution part of its business from end-to-end.

Built from raw space and designed by NELSON Chicago, the new offices feature a sleek, forward-thinking look that recently earned a RED Award from the Illinois Chapter of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) for exemplary design.

Opportunity to Mobilize
The larger warehouse and corresponding surge in market demand presented an ideal opportunity for IPC to put its own devices, including the Linea Pro and Infinea Tab M™, to work to manage the business and streamline operations. The Linea Pro and Infinea Tab M, which both include a barcode scanner and magnetic stripe reader, attach to an iPod touch® and iPad® mini, respectively, and run on custom software to perform a variety of tasks.

infinite-peripherals2

Previously, the warehouse used a manual, paper-based system, which not only was time-consuming but also subject to occasional human error. Knowing the power and capabilities of its own products, IPC chose to eliminate this system entirely in favor of electronically gathering and recording data via the iPod touch and Linea Pro or the iPad mini and Infinea Tab M.

To make this happen, IPC partnered with xkzero, a software developer who already was using IPC devices with ERP business management software for data collection for its own customers. The software group shadowed IPC warehouse employees to experience firsthand and understand the typical work process, business needs and potential snags. xkzero then built a software framework that included the Apple® devices and IPC peripherals, incorporating a step-by-step replacement of what IPC warehouse staff formerly was doing manually.

With the paper-based system, employees facing special cases communicated via written notes, which were shared back and forth to keep operations moving. xkzero had to determine a way to incorporate this communications tool within the software to facilitate efficient workflow. Now, the notes are electronic and stay with the product throughout the entire process so that they are easily and quickly found, read and managed.

Due to the intuitive, user-friendly nature of the iPod touch and the iPad, along with the step-by-step software, training on the new system was remarkably rapid, only taking about two hours to familiarize the six-person IPC team with the automated, electronic process.

 xkzero fully automates the Pick, Pack and Ship processes for Infinite Peripherals, and also completes small parcel shipping by passing along the shipment information, including dimensions and weights, to Starship by V-Technologies. 

From start to deployment, it took xkzero approximately seven months to build the software infrastructure to communicate with the iOS device; and once the framework was set, the implementation process only lasted about two months.

Win-Win
Today, IPC handles inventory receipt, organization and picking; labeling (using the company’s DPP-450 mobile printer) and shipping; serial number tracking; and quality control with its new mobile platform. Currently, five IPC devices are used in the warehouse, including a new IPC product that is undergoing testing prior to launch.

Upon eliminating paper in the warehouse, the company had to determine a new way to identify boxes and shipping containers before they were labeled. In the past, staff would attach a picking list to boxes so that they knew their location. The team now uses its own mobile printer to create labels with a barcode; these labels are affixed to the boxes and can be easily scanned to identify contents and order details.

Infinite Peripherals Sage 100 ERP system users don’t waste unnecessary time navigating menus or failing to find what they are looking for fast enough because they use GetX-Universal Search for Sage 100 ERP by xkzero.

The mobile solution in the IPC warehouse enables the company to ship between 2,000 to 5,000 devices each week. Currently, there are approximately 400,000 IPC devices on the market, primarily in the retail, restaurant and hospitality sectors.

Infinite-peripherals3Using its own devices, IPC has benefitted from a 25 percent increase in productivity in the warehouse, along with reduced employee errors and significant time and cost savings.

With the advancement in technology and the rapid pace of business, opportunities for mobility have never been greater. It’s important to prioritize projects like this and develop a smart system now to be best prepared to be competitive in the future.

Infinite Peripherals equips their sales reps with iSales 100, the native sales app xkzero built exclusively for Sage 100 ERP. When IPC’s sales team members meet with major retailer customers, they now have easy access to the answers to all the important questions about information housed in their ERP. And they are ready to take an order or leave a quote any time, anywhere.

Article written by Andrew Graham, President & Co-Founder, Infinite Peripherals, Inc.

Original Article:
Graham, Andrew. “Streamlining Warehouse Operations with Mobile Devices.” BarCode.com The BarCode News, Web. July 2014.

About Infinite Peripherals, Inc.
Since 1993, Infinite Peripherals, Inc. (IPC) has been fueling mobility with cutting-edge mobile peripheral devices, receipt printers, mechanisms and receipt printer-related components. Numerous major retailers in the United States are moving to mobile POS with IPC’s Linea Pro® and Infinea Tab®, helping to transform shopping, drive traffic and increase customer conversion rates. Anticipating trends and pre-empting solutions for a constantly evolving business landscape, IPC enhances operations in retail and other industries, including healthcare, hospitality, transportation, warehouse and logistics, entertainment and security. For more information, please visit www.ipcprint.com.

 

 

Find Inventory Items by Image in Sage 100 ERP with GetX Search

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In a large inventory database it can be sometimes challenging to determine whether you have selected the right inventory item based simply on the item number and the description.

In Sage 100 ERP you can work with confidence and select inventory based on an image file stored directly in your Sage 100 ERP item master file.  With GetX Search by xkzero you can now search an item entering partial inventory item numbers or descriptions, then quickly choose your item based on the image displayed.

Revolutionize ERP.

Contact us at info@xkzero.com, call 847-416-2009 – or, heck, simply download your free 30 day trial of GetX Search for Sage 100 ERP from our website.