Any business dealing with goods and materials needs to have some way to monitor where they are, where they’re going and how they’re getting there. Staying on top of these logistics — and other factors, like stock levels and reorders — is the essence of distribution management, a set of strategies that can go a long way towards improving your operations.

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Article Roadmap

• What Is Distribution Management?
• Role in Supply Chain Process
• How Software Can be Beneficial
• Next Steps

Taking part in the best practices of distribution management means paying near-constant attention to every piece of the supply chain, from obtaining initial materials to delivering the final product to customers or intermediaries. Though these processes can be complex, tools like distribution software can help make them easier for even the smallest and least experienced businesses.

In this article, we’ll go over some of the ins and outs of distribution management — what it is, how it can benefit your business and how the right software solutions can make it more efficient.

What Is Distribution Management?

Distribution management is the process that oversees the movement of goods through a supply chain, from supplier to manufacturer to retailer to customer. If distribution refers to the optimization and execution of every step in the supply chain, then distribution management makes sure each step is performed to the best of a business’s abilities.

Any business can engage in distribution management, but it takes certain skills to engage in it to its full potential. Along with business knowledge, it requires constant, careful supervision and the ability to quickly strategize as problems arise.

Distribution managers must have a thorough understanding of the operations at every stage of the supply chain and the ability to juggle multiple tasks at once, ensuring that materials and goods continue to flow without interruption from warehouse to factory to final delivery location.

Role in Supply Chain Process

Though there are many parts in every supply chain process, some are key for any business. Here, we’re going to focus on the role of distribution management in inventory, warehousing and shipping activities — three essential areas to consider when you want to optimize the flow of goods and materials from creation to fulfillment. Let’s go over each in a bit more detail.

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Inventory

Maintaining a steady supply of goods and materials is crucial to keeping your supply chain moving, ensuring your business is able to meet the demands of the marketplace at any given time. Not only do you need enough raw materials to continue manufacturing your company’s product, but you also need to have enough product on hand to keep deliveries and intermediaries supplied.

Good distribution management practices involve constantly monitoring this aspect, being ready to redirect or reorder supply shipments at a moment’s notice. It also goes hand in hand with warehouse management (which we’ll cover below), as the locations of these goods and materials are key in minimizing delivery times and improving the efficiency of the entire process.

Using distribution software to handle inventory can make things much easier, especially for smaller businesses and managers without much experience in the field. You can easily monitor and trace where goods are and where they need to be, and also submit reorders when supplies are running low in any part of the supply chain to ensure there aren’t any slowdowns.

Warehousing

As mentioned above, inventory management works hand in hand with warehouse management. Larger businesses with wider-ranging manufacturing and delivery networks need to make sure their warehouses are well-stocked with goods and materials, facilitating the manufacturing and shipping steps of the distribution management process.

Effective warehousing means coordinating deliveries from the proper locations in order to minimize the time it takes for goods to reach customers, as well as the time it takes for materials to reach manufacturing facilities. Inventory stocks and the locations of goods and materials need to be monitored carefully to ensure you’re maximizing the usefulness of your warehouses.

Software helps with warehousing by automatically locating the closest warehouse to your shipping destination, helping you coordinate shipments with minimal need to manually trace goods.

Shipping

Once your goods are manufactured and stored, all that’s left to do is to deliver them to direct customers and indirect intermediaries. The shipping aspect of distribution management involves coordinating and tracking those deliveries to ensure that your products are reaching their destinations in as efficient a manner as possible, connecting with the appropriate warehouses to minimize shipping times.

Good shipping and delivery management means having up-to-the-minute information to keep your clients and intermediaries informed on where shipments are and when they’re expected to reach each stage in the process.

You also need to keep them informed of developments in the event of delays or other issues, including what you’re doing to work around them so their deliveries get where they need to go.

Tracing shipments using distribution software helps streamline these processes, allowing all involved parties to receive regular updates each time a package or shipment changes its location. This not only improves visibility for you, but also greatly improves your customers’ trust in your business, opening the door for them to make return purchases and continue to invest in your products.

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How Software Can be Beneficial

We’ve gone over a few of the ways that incorporating distribution software into your workflow can improve your distribution management process. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the other potential benefits.

Productivity

Utilizing software to handle distribution management tasks means you can automate certain parts of the process that would be otherwise extremely time-consuming, or near-impossible, to do manually.

Package tracking can be performed without delivery drivers and warehouse workers manually entering package details into your database, and reordering supplies can be set to happen automatically once a warehouse reaches a certain threshold.

This cuts down time spent on low-level tasks, freeing up your employees to tackle higher level operations that require their ingenuity. Letting the software take over data entry tasks also reduces inconsistencies that could result from typos or other human errors.

Efficiency

In addition to the time-saving perk of automation, distribution software can improve your business’s efficiency in many ways. For example, some solutions are equipped with machine learning that suggests the best warehouses for each delivery, minimizing delivery times without requiring you to manually assess the distances.

Many of these operations and calculations are performed in the moment by the software, eliminating the need for you and your employees to do them manually. In a business where every second counts, any time saved helps. Giving software the reins for basic tasks means all you need to do is approve or deny the decisions it makes.

Transparency

Customer trust in your business can go a long way towards building lasting relationships and ultimately increasing revenue. Maintaining transparency for deliveries and other distribution tasks helps encourage this. You can use the software to automatically update package information each time it’s scanned into or out of a warehouse or delivery vehicle, keeping your customers informed about their deliveries in real time.

The software can also facilitate support requests when other issues arise, helping customers easily connect with your help desk and notifying them as their request is updated. In the end, you’ll have more satisfied customers, better reviews and more repeat business, improving your standing with less of a burden on you and your staff.

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Next Steps

Optimizing your distribution management process can go a long way towards improving your business’s standing, customer satisfaction and revenue. We hope this guide has helped you understand the best practices for distribution, from product creation to final delivery.

Incorporating the right software into your process can help you get the most out of your distribution management strategies. If you’re ready to evaluate your options, check out our requirements template to see which features might suit your needs best, or download our distribution software comparison report to see how some of the top software options on the market stack up against each other.

How have you handled your company’s distribution management? Let us know in the comments.