Seven processes I would inspect first inside a $10M distributor

A distributor doing ten million dollars typically runs on an ERP bought years ago, an email inbox that functions as a queue, and a set of spreadsheets nobody wants to be responsible for. The work is not badly run. It is just that no single person has ever been given the job of improving it, so it accumulates.

These are the seven places I would look, in order.

1. Order entry

Always first, because it is high volume and it sits directly on revenue. Orders arrive as email, PDF and portal exports, and someone reads each one and types it into the ERP. This is where the largest single block of recoverable time in the business usually is.

2. Invoice and PO matching

Supplier invoices get compared against purchase orders and receipts by hand. The matches are boring and the mismatches are where the money is. A person should only ever see the mismatches, and today they see everything.

3. Quotes and pricing

Ask how long a quote takes and whether customers ever chase for one. Pricing rules usually exist, partly in the ERP and partly in a rep’s memory, and the gap between those two is worth finding on its own — before any technology is involved.

4. Inventory and stock enquiries

"Do you have this in stock?" arrives by phone and email all day and gets answered by a person opening the ERP. It is a lookup wearing the costume of a conversation, and it interrupts people who were doing something else.

5. The weekly report

Someone spends part of Friday assembling numbers management should already have. Two costs: the hours, and the fact that the business is steering on a picture that is up to a week old. The second one is the expensive one, and it never shows up in a business case.

6. Customer service enquiries

Where is my order, what did I order last time, can I change the delivery date. Every one of these is a lookup against systems the customer cannot see. Classification and a drafted response with the facts already attached turns a ten-minute task into a thirty-second review.

7. Supplier and product data

Price lists and specifications arrive as spreadsheets in inconsistent formats and get merged into the ERP by hand. Low glamour, high error rate, and the errors surface later as pricing disputes with customers.

The two questions I ask in the first meeting

First: what would break if the person who has been here longest took a month off? The answer names the undocumented processes faster than any audit.

Second: which spreadsheet would you be most upset to lose? That names the mission-critical internal application nobody has admitted is an application yet.