Business Intelligence Can Be A Game Changer For Wholesale Brands

I recently wrote in this blog about the Business Intelligence (BI) opportunities for retail companies. Retail brands that use BI to get closer to what their customers want can reduce cart abandonment rates and offer discounts or special offers designed for the individual customer.

Intelligence and insight not only creates happy, more loyal customers, but also drives increased revenue.

But many similar benefits can be enjoyed in the wholesale area. These are the companies that buy in bulk from consumer product brands and sell to retailers. Because this is a Business to Business (B2B), rather than Business to Consumer (B2C) strategy, there are some differences in implementation and the benefits that can be achieved, but in principle many of the retail gains can work further up the supply chain.

What does this mean for wholesale companies?

• Identify sales opportunities: use insight and intelligence based on your retail customers’ behavior and history, plus additional data, so you can identify where there may be opportunities to offer more – cross selling and upselling opportunities.
• Inventory costs: it costs a lot to order products in bulk, store them in a warehouse, and then distribute them to retailers. BI can help to more accurately predict what levels of stock will be optimal so inventory can be reduced.
• Real-time insight: wholesale managers are often waiting for sales reports so they can make future buying decisions. Eliminate all this wasted time and allow real-time insight into your stock and delivery levels. Allow managers to make future decisions immediately – not after a report that is only updated once a day.

These changes have a clear strategic impact on wholesale businesses. It creates the opportunity to be more strategic and proactive. Managers can base their decisions on a real-time date with predictions provided – not just constantly looking into a rear-view mirror and hoping that tomorrow is like yesterday.

This approach to BI is also cost effective. With cloud-based software systems, this type of technology infrastructure is far easier to implement than it would have been just a few years ago. Even smaller companies can benefit from this approach. The traditional ERP systems used by most wholesale brands were expensive and required expertise to maintain – that has changed. You can now be up and running very quickly with a system that is extremely easy to use.

The strategic use of BI by wholesalers allows for processes such as demand forecasting to be a constant and ongoing process – not just a quarterly or monthly review and prediction. This intelligence allows wholesalers the ability to manage inventory levels more efficiently, but also to have an eye on what may happen next.

Since the start of the Covid pandemic, companies across the world have suffered supply chain problems. If your wholesale business intelligence can help to predict where problems are going to arise, and how to mitigate them, then you will already be one step ahead of the competition.