The unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have transformed the landscape of the food industry. The sector accounts for over 40% of the total wholesale revenue generated in Australia. And with technological advancements and advent of seamless tech tools, businesses are digitising their operations to boost growth and profits.
Food retailers and wholesalers must leverage the spike in ecommerce sales and online distribution practices to deploy foolproof order management software.
Whether you’re a shopper or a seller, you understand the frustration that occurs as a result of negative buyer-seller experiences and mishaps. E-shopping and selling has become a vital part of our daily life, and customers’ expectations have taken a dramatic U-turn.
When food wholesalers fail to offer a holistic and satisfying buying experience to their clients, both business and their client portfolio suffers. The risk of losing high-profit clients increase, and there’s a chance of reduced business value, recognition, and performance.
If you’re a food wholesaler who wishes to succeed and gain an excellent competitive edge over competitors, you must provide consistently, assured, and exceptional value to your clients. And there’s no better way to excel at this job than by implementing online food distribution management.
As businesses seek to automate their operations, food wholesalers are implementing cutting-edge order management solutions like OrderTron to improve their business’s growth.
Food businesses with a powerful and robust order management system are likely to gain rapid and quicker success by running their operations without errors or blunders.
Let’s dig deeper and learn how an OMS can benefit your food wholesale venture this year.
What is an OMS?
OMS or an Order Management System is a software application designed to manage, monitor, analyse, store, and optimize all the aspects of the order fulfillment lifecycle. From the moment a customer places an order to the delivery and payment collection, an OMS can effortlessly handle all the logistics unit’s critical functions.
An order management software allows the suppliers and distributors to communicate without having to commute long distances. This makes client handling extremely convenient and generates forecast reports based on client purchase history. Plus, it eliminates backorder issues and reordering.
Cutting-edge and modern OMS tools like OrderTron are specially designed to assist food wholesalers with efficient order management, delivery, and unhinged business growth.
If you’re managing your wholesale food supply manually, you might face challenges like:
- Handling multiple orders for the same client
- Analysing and real-time re-stocking inventory
- Keeping track of the existing stock in your warehouse
- Managing backorders
- Trouble controlling in-house, warehouse, or drop-ship vendors
- Gaining client feedback and addressing their reservations and complaints, etc.
Fortunately, the solution for all the issues mentioned above lies in one tool—Order Management Software.
Benefits of an OMS for Your Wholesale Food Business
Given the shifting market conditions, the food industry is moving towards digitised and online orders. From suppliers to end-consumers, everyone now wishes to place online orders without having to bear the commuting and traveling hassle.
If you’re a part of the wholesale food industry, you must enable your business to provide an online order placement experience for clients. If you haven’t deployed an OMS yet, you’re missing out on a lucrative opportunity to witness exponential business growth and expansion.
And by deploying online order management for your food wholesale business, you’ll not just reap the cost-effective and time-efficient benefits. Your business will be well-equipped to target the right client at the right time.
Let’s take a look at the seven highly-beneficial aspects of order management software.
1. Improves Customer Satisfaction
It’s a no-brainer that satisfying and meeting the needs of your clients is a top business objective. Despite your lucrative investments, you won’t see steady business growth and success if you’re unable to retain customers.
An order management software offers an excellent opportunity to create long-lasting client relationships. It helps food suppliers keep track of what their clients want or will want in the future. As a result, they’re able to make accurate inventory projections.
An OMS also helps food suppliers track prospect customers, predict their purchase habits and specific demand details. It helps in creating tailored pricing plans, incentives, and order-specific compensations to encourage them to keep coming back.
2. Ensures Efficient Inventory Management
Whether you sell one food item or hundreds of items, inventory management software can optimize your supply function across the board. Real-time inventory tracking is one of the biggest challenges facing many food suppliers during this uncertain situation. All it takes is one phone call from a dissatisfied client to negatively impact your client portfolio and business profits.
With an OMS, real-time stock updates are available to you anytime, anywhere. It also helps in preventing overstocking and understocking issues that mitigate the risk of unavailability during high demand seasons. You can run predictive analysis to forecast your supply and demand forces for upcoming months and stay ahead of order fulfillment dates. Ultimately, this decreases inventory errors and inaccuracy and accelerates business’s efficiency.
3. Mitigates the Supply-Demand Gap
Many food wholesalers face an unprecedented gap in their order supply and demand. Your business might collapse if it experiences an unexpected surge in orders, leading to fulfilment delays and increased risk of erroneous deliveries.
An OMS can help you stay atop your warehouse functions, in-transit stock, and in-house inventory, making it easier to fulfil urgent orders and deprioritise the non-urgent ones. It automatically assigns inventory to customers as soon as an order is placed in the system.
4. Simplifies Omni-Channel Sales
Modern practices in the wholesale food sector no longer entertain single-channel sales systems. Business owners now aim to provide a comprehensive, multi-channel buying platform to their clients.
Leverage an OMS to integrate all of your manual sales platforms with a single tap and steer clear of faulty shipments, late deliveries, quality concerns, and crossed clients.
When your orders are timely fulfilled, there’ll be less product wastage, which automatically translates into lower operational costs.
5. Boosts Price Management
Your business can reap high profits only if you’re careful about profit margins, prices, and costs. With increasing inflation and economic turmoil, food retailers expect to buy quality products without paying high prices, which is where an OMS can help you.
It provides you a holistic overview of past and current client orders, which can be analysed and compared to fulfil future customers’ expectations.
6. Assists in Expense Tracking
OMS solutions allow you to minimize unwanted and unexpected business expenses by keeping a vigilant eye on day-to-day expenditures. From existing cash flows to account receivable and payable amounts, an OMS can handle it all.
With an efficient OMS tool, your days of manual bookkeeping and invoice management will be long gone and soon forgotten. You can monitor and manage costs incurred in preparing, packaging, dispatching, and moving deliveries from one location to another.
Moreover, an OMS ensures precise monetary rendition of each order without a manual registry.
7. Offers Mobile Order Management
Meeting with clients and having an in-person talk about order placement and management has become quite risky during the pandemic. An order management system allows online integration of client-supplier communication and helps business owners receive orders anytime, anywhere, from any customer.
OMS has eliminated food suppliers’ geographical limitations and has made order placement and fulfilment easier and more convenient than ever. With a mobile app, the client can place an order without ever meeting in person. A mobile-friendly website or mobile app helps you stay close to your clients and attract new ones from the comfort of your workspace.
Objectives of Deploying an OMS for Your Food Wholesale Biz
Before investing in an OMS, you must analyse and craft an objective plan for your business. This includes detecting existing problems in your inventory and logistics units and their potential solutions.
Here are some of the goals you must set to achieve with the help of an efficient OMS for your food business:
- Meet delivery schedules using real-time inventory data
- Get an overall picture of available and out-of-stock inventory.
- Plan and source produce to fulfill changing and fleeting requirements of food retailers and end-consumers
- Minimize expired inventory and stay mindful of food waste management
- Ensure QC and QA and compliance with regulatory codes and business guidelines
All-in-all, an OMS allows you to attract more dollars, customers, and expand your food business to newer locations. Clients who might’ve never laid an eye on your wholesale business might just come in with bulky orders after observing your foolproof, online order placement system.
Deploy the Best Order Management Software for Optimising Your Food Business
OrderTron is an order management software solution designed to enhance your food business’s performance, whether you’re a supplier or a customer. Our cutting-edge software application also offers mobile-integrative features that allow customers to place orders from anywhere at any time. It also eliminates the risk of order delays, errors, and quality issues by ensuring fresh and intact food products are delivered to your client in a timely manner.
Our solution offers an efficient online ordering feature, wholesale food distribution, and a mobile app for convenient order placement and tracking.
To learn more about OrderTron and how it can help your business, contact us today.