Buy it right, hold the right amount, get it out.
If you do not make anything, the whole business is buying, holding and shipping. That means lead times you can trust, a stock figure that accounts for what is already promised, and a picking process that does not depend on who is in. Gydon does all three, and you leave the production modules switched off.
Reordering that is suggested, not remembered
Every line carries a minimum and a target level, its suppliers, their prices and their lead times. What is below where it should be becomes a purchase order to the supplier who normally provides it, and goods receipt books it in and closes the loop.
Where a container or a consignment is on the water, it is tracked from the supplier to the shelf rather than existing as an email thread and a note in a diary.
- Several suppliers per line, each with their own price and lead time
- Purchase orders on your own paperwork, with part deliveries handled properly
- Inbound consignments tracked to arrival
- Every stock movement carrying the document that caused it, so a figure can be explained
What is on order, and what state each one is in.
Available is a smaller number than on hand
A wholesaler's worst day starts with selling something twice. Holds put stock aside for the order that claimed it, so what a salesperson or a website sees is what can genuinely be sold rather than what happens to be on a shelf.
Stock sits by site, area and bay, and where a line has to be traceable, batches carry through goods in and out on the delivery.
- Stock by location, read and written by the same warehouse handset
- Counts that freeze the lines being counted, then post a reasoned adjustment
- Batch traceability where it is needed, and nowhere it is not
- Units that survive contact with reality, including selling in packs of what you buy by the metre
On hand, and what is actually free to sell.
Picked, packed and out, on a handset
The warehouse app takes an order from picking through packing to dispatch: what to pick and from which bay, how many parcels, and a label printed at the bench. It runs on an offline queue, so a dead spot at the back of the racking does not stop the job.
If you deliver yourself, rounds are planned from the same orders and run from the driver's phone. If you use carriers, shipments record what left, in how many parcels, with the tracking against the order.
The stores, working from the same orders as the office.
What distributors usually switch on
- Inventory and Purchasing
- Materials and products, locations, holds, batches, counts, suppliers, purchase orders and consignments.
- Operations
- Work orders where you assemble or kit, and shipments for everything that goes out.
- Warehouse App
- Lookups, goods in, moves, counts, and pick, pack and dispatch on a handset.
- Marketplaces and shop sync
- Where you also sell online, one stock pool feeding Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Mirakl operators, WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
- Logistics
- Your own rounds, third party carriers, or both side by side.
- Probably not
- Manufacturing, routing and shop floor clocking, unless you assemble or kit enough for the labour to be worth costing.
Bring your worst stock line
The one that is always either out of stock or overstocked. We will show you where the replenishment levels and the holds would have caught it.