Leading Practices for Wholesale Distribution

With thousands of successful implementations, NetSuite has a deep understanding of wholesale distribution businesses across
all sectors and the many challenges they face. As the pace of change in business accelerates—especially for those still relying on aged, on-premise ERP systems, wholesale distributors are struggling to keep up. As they strive to improve business performance and increase customer satisfaction in an increasingly competitive environment, they are struggling with:
- Metrics based on unreliable data.
- Ineffective inventory utilization.
- Difficulty expanding into multiple channels.
- Inefficient order processes and inaccuracies.
- Order orchestration and inventory visibility issues.
- Manual processes that cannot scale.
There is no other company that can provide WDs with a complete solution that delivers Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) commerce, marketing, sales, management, sourcing, warehousing, and support capabilities built into one customizable platform.” Frost & Sulliva
As they seek to address these challenges, wholesale distribution companies are concerned about the time and capital required to fix their back-end systems.
However, they realize that the ability to rapidly adapt and scale is critical to their success. What they need is a proven solution that can rapidly accelerate their business with a modern architecture—to go from zero to cloud in 100 days or less. What they need is NetSuite.
NetSuite delivers a unique set of processes, activities and systems specifically designed to deliver rapid value. It provides our customers with a strong foundation to transform their business with a pre-configured solution and methodology that includes proven:
Detailed workflows
- 18 pre-configured functional roles
- 25 dashboards
- 214 KPIs
These leading practices leverage NetSuite’s unmatched experience and knowledge in wholesale distribution. The focus is on enabling our customers to rapidly meet their business objectives and seamlessly grow and scale with NetSuite.

A Proven Path to Success for Wholesale Distributors
NetSuite delivers a unified and phased pathway for our customers to succeed and scale their business. Here is how it works:
- The first step is all about making sure wholesale distributors have a single view of customers, orders, items and inventory. From our experience in the sector, we know just how difficult it is to sell anything without it. Getting a wholesale distribution business on a real-time platform so all channels are operating from a unified base is the critical foundation. NetSuite has seen customers improve gross margins 1–5%.
- Once there, wholesale distributors are in a better position to add ecommerce or other omnichannel capabilities to enhance and provide a greater customer experience. This phase is critical as increasingly buyers move online, according to the latest research, 30% of buyers complete at least ½ of their purchases online.
- From there, they are freed from the constraints of their legacy systems and are ready to tackle challenges such as a lack of visibility or inefficiencies in their supply chain.
- Ultimately, the focus turns to more innovative and disruptive strategies such as pricing and margin management and business intelligence. NetSuite has seen its customers improve their actionable insights by over 56%.
Delivering Transformative Results
Solution providers will often talk about ‘roles’—however, NetSuite delivers all the tools needed from day one so that anyone can get up and running quickly with the right workbench to be successful. Whatever the job function, it will come pre-configured with all the KPIs, reminders, reports, and value- driven dashboards for daily and strategic needs—proven from years of real-world use by thousands of people in similar roles at wholesale distribution companies.
Are you ready to put NetSuite leading practices to work and take your business from zero to cloud in 100 days or less? Contact us for FREE consultation.