Interactive Product Master
Traditionally, food distributors expanded their product lines by offering the full catalog of items available from redistributors. Customers and sales reps accessed these additional supplier catalogs to find and order non-stock items, which created a manual and disjointed process that was often a nightmare to manage and presented many challenges:
- Each product had to be manually set up in the distributor's back-office system, a time consuming process
- Decisions had to be made regarding pricing
- The purchase order placed and entered manually
- The order had to be manually managed from the initial request through delivery to the customer
- Constantly having to manually update the costing information from the redistributor in the back-office system and updating of the price offered to the customer
With so many manual steps, order errors are common and margins are often too low. AFS Technologies identified the key components of this error-prone process and created a single application that completely eliminates errors by automating the manual process.
Not only does this improve margins, but it greatly maximizes your sales potential by increasing the number of products you can offer your customers. The newest addition to AFS Technologies' suite of business automation solutions is known as the Interactive Product Master (IPM).
The IPM is a cloud-based application developed on Microsoft's AZURE platform that combines multiple vendor catalogs into a single, easy-to-use interface for distributors and brokers/sales agencies. This intuitive business automation solution streamlines the complicated, multi-step process many companies face when choosing replacement or non-stock items.
In addition to optimizing the order-to-cash process and increasing sales opportunities with customers, products may be added directly into ERP and order management systems via an intuitive export and synchronization function. The IPM solution provides information stored in your back-office system that includes, cost, product packaging, product description and product availability. Since information is continuously updated from redistributors, you'll never sell products below cost or that can't be delivered.
The Interactive Product Master ensures timely and accurate information is always available and eliminates the need to manually follow an order to completion. Through cutting-edge technology and product innovation, the redistributor's catalog simply becomes an extension of your existing catalog, seamlessly integrated into your ERP and order management systems. Additional support includes integration with PROFILE™, the food and beverage industry's largest product information database.
FEATURES and BENEFITS
Users:
From a user perspective, the objective of the IPM is to eliminate costly manual processes by providing two functions for:
- Accepting/Rejecting new items you want to offer your customers.
- Accepting/Rejecting price changes to these items and allowing users to easily export and/or synchronize this data to your existing systems.
Administrators:
From an administrative perspective, the system allows:
- Simple configuration of new vendors and which products from those vendors to offer to your customers.
- The ability to manage buyers/users and apply appropriate levels of product and vendor security, and define automatic synchronization or configurable export files.
This robust solution can interface with your existing ERP and order management systems or as a stand-alone solution that can be used to access product information from anywhere with Internet access.
