If you own a wholesale, distribution, or manufacturing business, then you understand the pain. The pain from manually receiving phone orders, email orders, online orders and having to key in data over and over again.

The drive for businesses to automate their supply chain is growing more and more. As a result, we recommend building a solid e-commerce website, designed to take B2b orders, and a customer centre, where your customers can view and settle invoice statements, along with quotes. The aim is to turn phone orders and email orders into online orders, freeing up your staff to do less administrative tasks and more business-building creative tasks.

Have you ever done the math? Let’s say each order takes 15 minutes to key in, and you receive 50 orders per day in any shape or form. We are talking about 12.5 hours of admin time per day, doing a task which can be automated.

Now, how about we crunch the numbers. Factoring in rent, administrative, and operating expenses, we can easily put the cost per hour of hiring a staff member to do this job at $40 per hour. If we multiply $40 by 12.5, we get $500 per day. If we further multiple this by roughly 250 business days in a year, we get $125,000 per year in costs you can easily eliminate.

If your business is not yet on a cloud ERP system connected to a website, we recommend this be the year you make a move.