Wholesale Distribution, Technology, and the Future of a Trillion Dollar Industry

This week's episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series featured an interview with DataXstream CEO Tim Yates and SAP Global Head of Wholesale Distribution Magnus Meier. DataXstream is an SAP partner that builds solutions to help customers maximize the effectiveness of their ERP infrastructure in order to get the most out of their SAP investments. Moreover, what they're doing is working. DataXstream won the 2020 SAP Pinnacle Award as SAP App Center's Partner of the Year back in April.

 

In our conversation today, we explored the future of wholesale distribution, including trends in digital transformation within the industry, the current state of the industry in 2020, and how COVID-19 has changed the way wholesalers work.

 

The Future of Wholesale Distribution

 

We took a brief look at the wholesale industry as a prelude to the conversation. In the US alone, there are approximately 415,000 wholesale businesses with combined annual sales of about $7.8 trillion. Supply chain visibility and order complexity challenges plague these companies and, at a time when customers have more choices than ever and expect top-notch customer service, wholesalers that don't prioritize fixing these issues won't survive. This is the problem that Tim, Magnus and their teams at DataXstream and SAP are trying to solve.

 

Our conversation was a wide-ranging one, including discussion of the following:

 

• Common challenges facing wholesale distributors and whether COVID-19 has made these challenges worse
• An understanding of the complexities in order and inventory management
• The possible technology solutions that wholesalers are turning to in order to ease their order and inventory management problems, including a look into OMS+, the order management system from DataXstream
• What successful customers have done to shorten time to value in order to maximize ROI when investing in software solutions
• A few customer use cases that explore how SAP and DataXstream customers have been able to meet their challenges head on by using OMS+

 

In today's fast-paced, data-driven, customer-centric business climate, it's easy to understand how a wholesaler could benefit from a solution that has the ability to save time, increase productivity, and drastically improve the customer experience. OMS+ does just that. Our team at Futurum Research had an opportunity to evaluate the OMS+ software solution recently. We broke down the key benefits for wholesalers and why it is a good software investment. You can check that out here. OMS+ is currently available on SAP App Center.

 

We wrapped up our conversation with a discussion about what's next for wholesalers. Tim and Magnus brought a wealth of knowledge to the conversation and it's one you don't want to miss.

 

Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show, the contents of this show should not be taken as investment advice.