Wholesale distribution is an $8.2tn industry and employs 25% of the workforce in the US.
In this episode of Power to the Pricing People, we double-click on the silent giant of commerce, exploring the trends and challenges shaping the sector. Chris Dieringer from Flintfox is joined by special guest Matt Petersen of Microsoft, who has spent 25 years working alongside wholesale distribution businesses.
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In this episode, Matt and Chris discuss consolidation within wholesale distribution. The drive for growth through acquisition is creating challenges as businesses struggle to integrate newly acquired operations. As a result, the appetite for digital transformation and business applications has never been higher as wholesale distributors look to gain overall control from inventory management to pricing.
Unveiling the Future of Pricing Technology
We also dive deeper into the pricing technology landscape, exploring the news that Microsoft has increased its base functionality in pricing through the launch of Microsoft Pricing Management. It’s a sell-side, attribute-based pricing solution within Dynamics 365 Supply Chain or Commerce. It’s designed for businesses who sell directly via a single channel and have straightforward pricing or rebate requirements.
Matt says: “Really it’s mostly focused around retail and manufacturing type of transactions, which is why we lean on partners like Flintfox who understand the wholesale and distribution model is different.”
“One of the things that all ERPs struggle with is high volume pricing. You have these complex prices that have to be determined for each material, for each customer, for each time frame. It’s a big calculation that has to happen for each one. We’ve seen that across the landscape of ERPs, wholesale distributors really struggle to generate a day’s worth of price lists in a day. They fall 10 minutes behind on the first day, 20 minutes behind the next day and before you know it they’ve skipped a month. So that’s an area that’s a real pain point.”
Empowering Wholesale Distribution with Flintfox
Over at Flintfox, our Pricing Engine for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is fast, comprehensive and ideal for businesses with high volume and complex pricing and rebates. For instance, both buy-side and sell-side pricing needs, or complexity in the form of customer, product or transaction attributes and businesses rolling out millions of prices through multiple channels.
Massive thanks to Matt Petersen for joining us on Power to the Pricing People. To find out more about how Microsoft and Flintfox are supporting the wholesale distribution industry, get in touch.
