Some time ago, we discussed the dangers of creating do-it-yourself route applications using generic form building tools. We pointed out that DIY applications are fine for non-mission-critical uses, but shouldn’t be relied upon for your route accounting needs.

How much time and effort is spent scrubbing orders before your distribution system fulfills them? What does that process cost in terms of staff time or computing time?

Can your old handheld computing system actually embarrass your employees? And should you care? According to our customers it can, and you should. Take the regional managers we talked to recently. Their old system was literally too embarrassing to be seen with in public.

Do You Know Where Your Sales Orders Are?   It’s a nightmare scenario: You get a call on your pager, your ISP’s data pipe into your data center is down. Nothing, not one byte is getting through. In a few hours your mobile sales force will begin their morning data downloads. Quick! What do you do?

A heart surgeon walks into the operating room to perform an operation, when suddenly the patient sits up and says:

What if your retail customers were so loyal, they’d rather walk on broken glass than order from your competitors? How would that affect your bottom line? Here’s how one company took their mobile sales automation tool and turned it into a loyalty generating machine:

In our last posting we talked about the options you have when you need to DEX. This week we cover things to look for when choosing a DEX system. DEX has been around for along time, and for that reason some people are tempted to think it must be easy to design and build. What we’ve discovered is that most of those same people eventually decide it’s easier to just buy an existing DEX system than build it from scratch. So, how do you evaluate a DEX solution? Here are four things to look for:

If your major retailers insist you DEX your invoices, and most of the chains do, you have several options based upon your circumstances:

As a distributor you’ve got people in the field selling your stuff and delivering your stuff. Every day they make all kinds of decisions that will make you money, or lose it—and the difference between a good decision and a bad one often comes down to information.

These days it is critical to protect your customer base, and preserve your brand loyalty. One of the most effective ways to do this is to keep your shelves full. Never let a shelf hole develop. Shelf holes not only damage your relationship with the retailer, they disappoint your customer, and most importantly, they allow your customer to try a competitor’s product.

Delivering clean invoices to your customers speeds your billing cycles and increases cash flow. On the other hand, a dirty invoice just slows everything down. If your drivers work from stacks of pre-printed invoices, dirty invoices are inevitable. After all, with pre-printed invoices hand written alterations are the only way to record what transpired in the field.