Twenty years of working inside distribution businesses, not reading about them. Purchasing, inventory, warehousing, fulfillment, and the integrations that hold the whole operation together.
The operational reality of a distributor is unlike almost any other business an ERP consultant encounters. Margin lives in inventory accuracy and fulfillment cost, not in the general ledger. A configuration decision about how you allocate stock across warehouses will affect your working capital more than most decisions your finance team makes deliberately.
Consultants without distribution background tend to make predictable mistakes: designing picking processes that assume a tidy warehouse, treating lot tracking as a compliance checkbox rather than an operational constraint, or configuring a costing method that produces defensible numbers and useless ones at the same time.
We have spent twenty years inside these businesses. The questions we ask early are the ones that surface expensive assumptions before they are built.
Costing method, valuation, multi-site and multi-warehouse structure, and the reservation logic that determines what your salespeople can actually promise.
Traceability that satisfies recall and compliance requirements without adding steps your warehouse staff will find ways around.
Replenishment, lead time handling, vendor performance, landed cost, and the difference between a purchase plan and a purchase hope.
Bin structure, directed picking, wave and load management, mobile device configuration, and cycle counting that fits real staffing.
Order-to-cash from entry through pick, pack, ship, and invoice, including the exception paths that consume most of your team's day.
Inventory valuation, cost of goods, rebates and chargebacks, and reporting that reconciles to what the warehouse actually holds.
An ERP that cannot talk to your trading partners, your carriers, and your warehouse is a very expensive accounting system. For most distributors the integration layer represents more risk and more ongoing operational dependency than the ERP configuration itself.
This is where a lot of implementations quietly fail. The core system goes live on time, and then three months of unplanned work appears because nobody scoped the EDI mapping properly, or the carrier integration cannot handle a multi-package shipment, or the 3PL sends inventory adjustments in a format nobody anticipated.
Trading partner onboarding, document mapping, and the acknowledgement and error handling that determines whether a failed transmission is noticed in minutes or at month end.
Order ingestion, inventory availability, pricing, and keeping the storefront honest about what can actually ship.
Rate shopping, label generation, multi-package shipments, and tracking data flowing back to customer service.
Inventory synchronization, order handoff, and reconciling what your system believes against what the 3PL reports.
Whether you run warehouse management inside D365 or through a third-party system, the boundary between the two needs to be deliberate.
Authorization, capture, and settlement flows that reconcile cleanly without manual intervention.
Tell us what you're working through. We reply within one business day, and there's no obligation — we're happy to give initial guidance even if we're not ultimately the right fit.
Prefer to talk it through? Call 720-219-6740