How to design an effective cloud eco-system for wholesalers

First thing I want you to do is I want you to take the accounting package and move it down to the bottom of our white board for a second, because we’re used to thinking that there’s the accounting system and all the add-ons around it, but that’s not really the way I want you to look at it right now. Usually, there’ll be another system which will be the heart of your operation, so for a wholesale business, it will be their inventory system. For a retail business, it will be their point-of-sale, or their e-commerce. That’s the system I want to stay in the middle.

In this example, we’ll talk about a wholesale business, so the inventory system is what we’ll see at the heart of our operation. This is where we have all our products, all our prices, all our customers, all our suppliers, everything happens there. When the phone rings and we get an order, we put it into our inventory system and we send information back to the client from that. When we need to get stock, we go into the inventory system to see what products are low on stock and we’ll send orders to our suppliers from them.

When we receive stock, we’ll receive it into the inventory system. The inventory system may be linked also from our e-commerce. It will update the e-commerce system, giving it the up-to-date stock levels, and it will receive orders that are entered through the e-commerce system. Then, at the end of everything, it will also update our accounting package with relevant dollar values for our P&L and balance sheet as needed.

This is how a wholesaler ecosystem might look. Obviously, there’s different systems that could sit in each one of these functions. If you want to talk more about how to design your own ecosystem for your business, book a session and we’ll have a chat.