Your Distribution System Said 40 In Stock. Your Shelf Had 12.
Track every item, every location and its true cost with a complete Business Central implementation live in under 20 weeks.
What Growth Does To A Distributor Who Isn’t Prepared
Most distributors use less than a third of what Business Central can do, and many don’t have BC at all. Add growth on top of that gap, and problems quickly escalate.
Product data breaks first.
A spreadsheet holds a few hundred SKUs without much trouble. Past a few thousand, pricing and cataloguing drift out of date faster than anyone can fix them.
Every new warehouse multiplies the guesswork.
One location, and you can walk the floor and know what's there. Add a second and a third, and stock discrepancies compound faster than anyone can reconcile by hand.
Order volume outruns manual entry.
Re-keying the same order into three systems is fine at ten orders a day. At a hundred, the errors cost more than the extra person you'd need to catch them.
The knowledge walks out the door with the storeman.
Ask most distributors who actually knows where everything is, and the answer is a person, not the system and the day he leaves, that knowledge leaves with him.
None of it is a people problem. It's what happens when growth outpaces a system nobody's kept up to speed.
The Six Problems We Solve for Distributors
When your stock levels talk directly to your sales orders, availability shifts from a guess at the counter to a promise you can keep.
Stock You Can't Actually Promise
Today's Distribution Reality
A customer orders, and only then does someone check whether it's actually on the shelf. By the time the answer comes back, the sale and the trust are already gone.
The DIY-ERP Correction
Real-time stock across every location, with automated reorder points and order promising, so a seller can tell a customer exactly when an item will arrive, before they say yes.
Margin Nobody Can See
Today's Distribution Reality
Freight goes up, supplier prices shift, and a customer-specific deal gets typed into a spreadsheet. Nobody notices margin has moved until the numbers land at month-end.
The DIY-ERP Correction
Landed cost allocates freight, duty, insurance and handling onto the real cost of goods as it's received, so margin is calculated on what stock actually cost, not the invoice price.
Numbers That Never Quite Agree
Today's Distribution Reality
Sales runs one system, purchasing another, the warehouse a third, and finance reconciles all of it by hand. Every report is yesterday's answer by the time it's read.
The DIY-ERP Correction
One system from quote to pick to invoice to ledger, with no re-keying, so sales, purchasing, warehouse and finance are all looking at the same number, updated as it happens.
Buying By Feel
Today's Distribution Reality
Overstocking ties up cash on things that don't move; understocking loses the sale. Without a system reading demand, buying comes down to a hunch and last month's memory.
The DIY-ERP Correction
Demand forecasting and planning worksheets turn sales history and open orders into what to buy and when, tuned to real lead times and supplier terms.
A Warehouse Running On Memory
Today's Distribution Reality
Nobody set up bins, because one person always knew where everything was. As volume grows, that stops scaling, and picking mistakes and late orders follow.
The DIY-ERP Correction
Bin-level tracking, directed put-away and pick, and lot or serial traceability, so the warehouse runs on structure instead of on whoever's been there the longest.
Paperwork Errors That Cost You The Order
Today's Distribution Reality
A big customer wants a specific price list, a specific unit of measure, and a clean order file. Manual handling gets it wrong, and the chargeback lands on you, not them.
The DIY-ERP Correction
Customer-specific pricing and units of measure, plus invoice automation through OCR and three-way matching, so the paperwork holds up for the customer that matters most.
How DIY-ERP Implementation Works
Your team configures it, learns it, and owns it, with a mentor on demand
Your biggest expense is having too much stock. Your biggest loss is not having the right stock. And your highest hidden cost is an un-optimised warehouse.
Self-Prescribed Scope.
You define your operational parameters upfront to instantly lock in one fixed price and a guaranteed go-live date.
Your Reorder Points, Set From Your Own Lead Times.
Your Super User configures planning parameters, reorder points and supplier lead times during the build, not from a consultant's best guess, so what the system buys matches how your business actually runs.
Session-Based Training.
Your Super User builds the platform alongside our mentors, learning how to set up a new price list or reorder rule themselves, not just operate what's already built.
Embedded LMS Inside BC.
Comprehensive learning modules sit directly inside your active Business Central workspace; no scattered cloud folders.
Total Tenant Sovereignty.
Implementation runs entirely within your secure Microsoft environment. Your stock, pricing and customer records never leave your tenant.
Built for Thin Margins
Margin visibility, by default.
The system allocates true cost the moment stock lands, so margin isn't something finance discovers weeks later.
Native Barcode Scanning, No Extra App.
Scan straight from a phone without a third-party warehouse system bolted on, so the warehouse runs on the same system as everything else.
The Whole Supply Chain In One View.
The Planning and Requisition Worksheet brings inventory, demand, purchase orders and lead times into a single screen, so shortages get fixed before they happen, not after.
Customers Order Their Way, You Ledger It One Way
Item cross-references let a customer order using their own part numbers, while everything still lands in the same unified ledger behind the scenes.
Know What You've Got. Know What It's Worth. Know What To Buy Next.
One fixed price, one date, and a system that remembers everything the spreadsheet couldn't. Scope your implementation and get a number that doesn't move.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Multi-location, real-time inventory is core. This is routine, not a stretch.
Yes. We'll also help you weigh up whether reactive customer-specific pricing is actually needed, or whether customer price groups and item discount groups get you there with less to maintain.
By allocating freight, duty, insurance, and handling to both incoming and outgoing stock, so you know your real cost by the time the sale is done.
Yes. That's the whole point. You clone your environment, test an idea, and move it into production without waiting on a consultant, because you set up the data and were trained on it yourself.
Not out of the box. EDI runs through a connector and trading-partner mapping, set up as its own module once we know which retailer and which format you need.
Structured data preparation and cut-over are built into the method. Data can be migrated in, stored in Fabric or Dataverse, or left where it is, depending on your systems.
You own the system and can extend it yourself. Business Central scales into the billions of dollars of stock, so you're not replacing it as you grow.
It won't do everything exactly the way every business currently does it, because it's built on best practice refined across decades of Microsoft ERP deployments. Where something genuinely doesn't fit, there's a proven add-on for it, confirmed with you upfront rather than discovered later.