Distribution Plus Brochure

Distribution Plus enables organizations to manage and exceed expectations - and deliver as promised

• View Printable Version

Verticent offers the first enterprise application software solution, entitled ERP Plus™, that truly integrates back-office applications for manufacturing, distribution and financials with front-office applications for customer support and sales force automation.

ERP Plus is an ­enabled software suite that extends communications across your entire organization and throughout your virtual supply chain. Verticent is focused on developing software solutions that enable users to know, understand and respond to their customers, suppliers, partners and employees. Distribution Plus™ is a core component of Verticent Integrated Enterprise Response.

With Distribution Plus, you can tighten and enhance your back-office order management, shipping, receiving and inventory tracking operations — which leads to better overall levels of customer satisfaction. As a fully integrated member of Verticent's ERP Plus suite, Distribution Plus touches several key areas of customer communications and enables back-office personnel to share specific customer data with manufacturing, financial, sales and customer service departments. With Distribution Plus, you'll do business on a per customer basis — and deliver beyond their expectations.

Gateway to Your Customers
Your organization’s distribution hub is the gateway to customer satisfaction — and you can meet, and beat, their expectations by delivering the right products to the right people, right on time. Start by setting proper expectations.

Distribution Plus provides up-to-the-minute information about on-hand inventory, in-transit inventory, replenishment orders, manufacturing schedules and lead times — all of which are important in communicating correct delivery times to your customers.

And whether your enterprise operates from one central location — or 100 around the world — Distribution Plus allows you to serve each customer individually.

Multi-site support in Distribution Plus is powered by a distributed integrated architecture that provides enterprise-wide visibility — regardless of geographical or time zone restrictions. Now, your entire enterprise has up-to-the-minute distribution information at their disposal.

International Support
Business today lives on a global scale, and Distribution Plus is ideally suited for companies competing on the world stage. International capabilities include full multi-currency support, international date formats, international phone number and address formats, customs documentation, tariffs and more.

Pricing Parameters
Internationally or domestically, Distribution Plus supports multiple pricing parameters. Via the intuitive Price List WorkBench, you now can easily manage complex pricing models with a user-friendly interface. Here, you'll associate unlimited price lists with any level of the item or customer hierarchy as well as with customer type. Distribution Plus also supports promotional and cumulative pricing.

Custom Forms
Effective, efficient communications with your customers is critical to their satisfaction. And by utilizing custom forms in Distribution Plus, you'll communicate more quickly and accurately.

Distribution Plus provides the following form templates — customized to meet your exact specifications: invoice, formal quote, acknowledgement, bill of lading, Return Material Authorization (RMA), credit memo, debit memo, pick list, pack list, bulk receipt label, location tag and serial/lot label. These forms can be printed, faxed or e-mailed automatically. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and XML support also allows you to electronically exchange purchase orders (PO), invoices, material release schedules, shipment authorizations and advance shipping notices with your customers. These documents can be transmitted via a traditional value added network (VAN) or the Internet.

Customer Profiles
To serve your customers better, you must know them intimately. As part of the entire suite of ERP Plus solutions, Distribution Plus enables you to store and share customer information throughout your entire enterprise — and even across your virtual supply chain.

Customer profiling capabilities in Distribution Plus allow you to define a wealth of information about your customers: their market segment/customer type, organizational hierarchy, shipping and billing preferences, payment terms, multiple contacts, locations and other user defined attributes.

You know your customers very well — now everyone in your enterprise can get to know them better.

Order Processing
Empower your back-office distribution personnel to set, meet and beat customer expectations. With order processing functionality in Distribution Plus, you can properly declare promise dates, ship the proper product — and deliver on time.

Order Configuration
Distribution Plus order processing capabilities enable you to quickly enter, clone, track and maintain sales orders, blanket orders, and hold and release orders. You also can authorize credit/debit memos, check credit online and manage returned goods.

Order Inquiry
The Order Inquiry WorkBench in Distribution Plus provides all users with powerful inquiry capabilities — allowing them to answer virtually any question about the status of a customer order. Here, users can specify search criteria to find particular customer orders — fast. The Order Inquiry WorkBench helps your entire company present a single, consistent face to your customers.

Enhanced Quote Generation
Distribution Plus makes it easy for everyone in your enterprise to enter, clone and track sales quotations. Now, your organization can view quote histories and automatically turn quotes into active sales orders.

Also, enhanced quote capabilities for attribute-enabled items allow you to enter, view and print specific attribute values for those items in Distribution Plus. Once sales orders are configured and orders are shipped — you can produce invoices and acknowledgments easily and on demand.

B2C Order Entry
In addition to maintaining business-to-business accounts, you can use Distribution Plus to setup and track Consumer accounts. To facilitate business-to-consumer (B2C) order processing, Distribution Plus automates the tasks of B2C order entry and customer setup.

With Distribution Plus order entry capabilities, you can track Consumer e-mail addresses, first name, middle name, last name and multiple phone numbers — and once entered, Distribution Plus can search via these criteria.

The new Quick Customer Setup window in Distribution Plus helps speed the order entry process. This window allows you to enter minimal customer information so the order entry process remains uninterrupted. Also, the Quick Customer Setup function automatically populates City and State fields when just a zip code is entered.

Spend more time dealing with your customers, not on data entry.

Integrated Credit Card Authorizations
With Distribution Plus you have the ability to accept credit card payments and authorize them online or offline. It also produces reports you can use to reconcile with the credit card companies.

And since Distribution Plus is integrated with ERP Plus, it automatically transfers credit card payment information to Financials Plus™. Don’t keep your customers guessing. Distribution Plus enables your organization to know exactly what’s been shipped, to whom and when it’s expected to arrive. The system also helps you track your shipping costs and in-bound shipments.

Shipping and Receiving
Distribution Plus allows you to define carriers, shipment methods, freight rates and customer routings. It also provides pick lists, pack lists, bills of lading, customs documentation and more — all designed to take the guesswork out of your shipping and receiving operations.

Drop Shipment Capabilities
Distribution Plus provides a comprehensive, automated means to processing drop ship orders. Key features include a method for separating drop ship line items within a regular order type, automatic purchase requisition generation, split lines for partial amounts to be drop shipped, and vendor notification of shipment.

Distribution Plus also verifies the vouchering of drop shipped POs to ensure correct entries and amounts are transferred to Financials Plus. 

Interfacing with Shipping and Manifest Software
Distribution Plus seamlessly interfaces with leading third-party shipping and manifest software.

If you launch these third-party applications, Distribution Plus will utilize them at the proper time in the ordering and shipping process to complete the transaction.

This seamless interface enables automated downloading of carrier information, rates and order-import/shipment-export. It also enables carrier freight rate analysis, carrier compliant labeling and electronic scale integration.

Inventory Management
Distribution Plus delivers complete visibility into inventory availability across multiple warehouses and distribution centers. Now you can proactively manage inventory in multiple locations and track all inventory movements, transfers, replenishments and movement histories via serial number, lot number, heat number or revision. Precise inventory management helps your company prepare for, and conduct, business in the e-economy.

A Move Toward e-Commerce
Is your enterprise ready for e-commerce? Before going virtual, you'll need to be able to answer at least one very important question — “What is your available on-hand inventory?” Once your company can consistently and accurately answer this question — you can begin planning for and conducting business on the Web.

Today, your competitors are just a mouse click away, and the key to keeping your customers is setting proper expectations and delivering beyond them. If you miss one obligation to your online customers, chances are they may not be back.

By maintaining a precise understanding of your organization’s inventory, you’re supporting a framework for online business — and Distribution Plus enables your back-office to become the backbone of true e-commerce.

Radio Frequency (RF)/ Bar Code Capabilities
To assist inventory tracking and management, Distribution Plus features advanced RF/bar code functionality. It provides the following RF-enabled transactions to facilitate easy data collection: Inventory Move Within a Facility, Print Location Labels, Shipping, Inventory Move, Physical Inventory and Cycle Counting. Know your inventory. Know your customer. Then, deliver your promises — and they'll stay satisfied.

Technology
The Distribution Plus technical environment features:

• Open systems, object-oriented, client/server architecture built on PowerBuilder™ platform
• Database compatibility with Sybase™, Microsoft® SQL Server®, SQL Anywhere™
• Client compatibility with Microsoft® Windows® 2000/XP/2007, or thin client Windows 2007 Terminal Server/Citrix Metaframe
• Integration with ERP Plus suite of front-office and back-office solutions

About Verticent
Verticent provides Integrated Enterprise Response to companies around the globe. Featuring fully integrated enterprise application solutions with innovative e-commerce capabilities, the Verticent ERP Plus software suite enables companies to completely integrate the management of front-office and back-office operations.

With Integrated Enterprise Response, companies extend their enterprise operations across the virtual supply chain and successfully respond to customers, suppliers, partners and employees around the world.

The ERP Plus software suite is comprised of Manufacturing Plus™, Distribution Plus™, Financials Plus, SFA Plus™ and Support Plus™ developed on one common technology platform, by one provider, to deliver seamless integration and enhanced functionality.

ERP Plus, Manufacturing Plus, Distribution Plus, Financials Plus, SFA Plus and Support Plus are registered trademarks of Verticent Corporation. All other products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

 

• If you would like more information about how Verticent Solutions can help your business, contact us today.