[eBook] How building suppliers and manufacturers can improve sales and stock management

Building is currently forecast to account for more than 13.2 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020, however, if the industry fails to address the underlying challenges in productivity, profitability and performance, growth may stagnate.

It’s not just industry shifts in raw materials that suppliers and manufacturers are facing. Shifting markets and the emergence of regional instability has resulted in currency fluctuations, which need a more advanced approach to managing risk.

The building industry is now having to quickly adapt to technology – such as cloud-based software, integrated collaboration, and mobile business intelligence – to increase efficiencies and improve profit margins.

Building suppliers and manufacturers generate huge sums of data from their customers, and increasingly more from other areas of the business such as stock management, staff performance, and sales results.

But many are still unaware of how their data can be optimized, or think they have it covered because they have an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

Analyzing data through complex spreadsheets or asking IT to run reports, however, can have a significant impact on a business’s ability to make quick decisions, which are necessary to remain competitive, let alone surge ahead of the competition.

In this eBook, we will review how analyzing your data can be done quickly and easily with industry leading business intelligence (BI) software. We will discuss the benefits of BI over ERP and other operational systems, how BI can help improve your overall sales, and why BI is an important solution for helping suppliers and manufacturers manage stock levels.

Organizations often overestimate their ERP’s capabilities. ERP systems fall short in their inability to perform deep-dive analyses that reveal strategic insights into your business. ERPs are not built to perform trend analyses or give you in-depth data.

Using data to understand your customer is crucial to sales success. Equipped with business intelligence, your sales team will have a better understanding of what your customers are buying, and what they are not.

Tracking sales data by customer can reveal trends and opportunities to better position your company for growth and prevent challenges before they impact your bottom line.

A good business intelligence solution enables you to quickly view how much stock you have for a particular product, and/or material, and sort from highest to lowest, or drill down on a specific selection to nd even more in-depth information.

The most common issues relating to stock management is overstock, understock, and dead stock. These can all have potentially costly outcomes for your business.

Appropriate stock levels enable your sales team to ensure customers will get their products delivered in full and on time (DIFOT).

If overstock is not returned or sold at a discount, it may simply become dead stock over time, resulting in costs for your business.

Overstock or dead stock that is valuable represents company assets that are not accessible, and therefore not producing a profit. This may prevent the company from investing in opportunities for business growth, or may put the business in a difficult position in times where sales drop off, or prices are pressed down through competition.

Instead, a Phocas business intelligence solution is designed to collate all of your data to reveal actionable insights into the underlying trends that make your business tick, simplifying the entire data analytics process, and helping suppliers and manufacturers make better decisions.

Our BI solution collects and converts data locked away in your business, and presents it in easy-to-understand charts, graphs and grids, allowing you to drill down and get to the core issues that make your business tick.

Information is available to anyone, anytime and you don’t have to be a spreadsheet expert to use it.