Distribution Management

Inventory Management

S2K Inventory Management System is a fully integrated inventory control system designed to maximize your ROI and effectively and efficiently handle all your inventory related processes. With S2K’s Inventory Management System applications, you have complete inventory control. You can track order commitments and shipments, inventory adjustments purchase orders and receipts, open work orders and WIP, and build kits. You can create and manage warehouse transfers and inter-company transactions, track lots and shelf life dates, track serial numbered items and much more. Comprehensive item inquiries provide a complete stock status of every item with drill down to transaction details, which can help you improve customer service.

Real-Time Inventory Information

In addition to a myriad of standard fields, S2K Inventory Management allows for an unlimited number of user defined fields that can be attached to the item master or the item balance file. Dynamic SQL searching makes it easy to find items by a wide number of data fields including part number, description, UPC, EAN, manufactures part number, vendor, product divisions and classes, and much more. Users can also link substitute and complementary items to improve fill rates and encourage up-selling. Multiple units of measure can be established with conversion factors for each item. Multiple UPCs (GTIN) make it easy to track the bar codes of each unit of measure in the warehouse. Serial number and lot control features provide complete tracking and historical data of every transaction.

Highlight Cost Effective Choices to Buyers

S2K Inventory Management utilizes the latest inventory reordering formulas to calculate reorder points based on historical or forecasted usage, vendor lead times, seasonal trends and demand. Buyers will have access to EOQ calculations that can point out the most cost-effective choices. Items can be grouped into buy-lines for purchase analysis by product group to take advantage of special pricing and discounts. Global inquiries provide quick views of current availability, dead stock items, inventory value, turns and suggested reorder quantities. Warehouses and individual items can be flagged for centralized or decentralized purchasing and replenishment.

Import Tracking

S2K Inventory Management encompasses import cargo tracking that allows you to track VAI’s product movement and calculate a true landed cost for each imported item. With complete integration to S2K Purchasing application, users can track containers, and the carrier, and view the estimated time of departure and arrival of every shipment. Users can assign unlimited number of cost factors to each shipment or item, and allocate each cost by unit, weight, cubic measure, or cost.

Customer Orders

Effective order processing is the first step in providing outstanding customer service. Immediate access to inventory, purchasing, manufacturing, and customer data is critical. S2K’s powerful order entry application was designed to allow rapid entry of customer orders, all while providing full access to enterprise data to answer your customers most difficult questions. With this dynamic application users can check stock across multiple locations, check the price history on any item, copy orders or items from history, review lots and shelf life dates, process serial numbered items, kits, and much more. Advanced options allow users to process direct shipment, and special orders at the line item level. For rapid entry, users can place orders from a customer shopping list or from a predetermined order guide. Up-sell options allow users to view current promotions, price breaks, and complementary items on-the-fly.
With our integration to S2K Manufacturing, users can review the component stock status of finished goods, check on open production and relay Available to Promise (ATP) dates to the customer, and they can use the built in configurator to choose features and options to build the Bill of Material (BOM) on-the-fly.

From one comprehensive application, users can process orders, quotes, returns, standing orders, and future orders. S2K Order Entry is also integrated with S2K CRM / Sales Force. From order entry sales reps can create follow up tasks on any transaction, access CRM notes, link quotes to opportunities, and track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. With S2K Order Entry you will not only improve your customer service, but you will exceed your customers’ expectations.

Customer Relationship Management

S2K Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software improves your bottom-line by strengthening customer loyalty. This CRM suite of applications is a cost-effective way to identify, acquire, develop, and retain your most profitable customers. With one central database, our customer relationship management software allows you to use your existing technology while providing an enterprise-wide view of all interactions with customers and prospects. This customer relationship management software has an integrated contact management feature that provides real time access to all customer and product information, and marketing automation tools that generate effective, consistent and timely campaigns.

Contact Management

S2K CRM facilitates complete order processing and customer / prospect tracking. One comprehensive sales team dashboard allows you to:

  • Generate quotes, enter orders, and track specific opportunities
  • Review current order status
  • Check item pricing and availability
  • View customer account information and history
  • Create to-do lists to flag follow-up activity

S2K CRM software gives you unlimited user defined fields, at the customer, contact, and opportunity level to provide you with a flexible database for searching and analysis plus detailed notes to help track all communications within each account. S2K CRM software gives everyone in your organization access to the same, up-to-date information, allowing them to react quickly to customer demands and provide the highest level of customer service.

Marketing Automation

Take advantage of your contact database with automated marketing campaigns that allow you to email, fax or mail sales or promotional related material directly from the sales team dashboard. S2K CRM software contains advanced sorting criteria options that enable you to select a specific target audience for your campaign. By using the group e-mail feature, you can send promotional sales information, item coupons, new product information, updated price lists and collateral instantly to selected contacts. Export options allow you to import lists into online marketing tools for advanced campaign tracking and analysis. All campaign broadcast information will be noted in the contact management notes file for easy review and follow up. This powerful tool allows you to increase the relevance and timing of your marketing messages, develop long-lasting customer relationships, and provide a valuable ‘dialog’ for additional customer contact.

Sales Force Automation

S2K CRM data is the foundation for our S2K Sales Force application. Today, immediate access to CRM and enterprise data is essential to your sales team in order to be productive. S2K Sales Force is a comprehensive online sales tool optimized for the supply chain professional. It provides browser-based access to CRM and Enterprise data to allow your sales team to leverage mobile devices and make the most of every sales call, whether they are in the office or out in the field.

Sales Analysis / Forecasting

Capturing accurate sales data from your billing system allows you to review profitability and can help you improve business operations. S2K Sales Analysis application measures sales volumes, costs and quantity usage, highlighting seasonal or recurring trends in your business. With this information, you can quickly identify profitable or unprofitable customers, vendors, and items, leading to improved vendor and customer relations based on volume, costs, and profitability. Retrieval of individual salesperson sales activity enables you to view which customers they are selling to, the items or class of items they are selling most, and the gross profit percent of the items being sold. For tighter credit control, sales forecasting software provides detailed analysis of credits and returns to help you target problem areas. With extensive history storage options, S2K Sales Analysis allows you to drill down from summary data to view specific invoices and the details of each invoice for review and analysis. All sales data can be presented in detail or summary form, on screen or via printed reports.

Turn Data into Forecasts

Sales forecasting is a crucial part of the financial planning of a business. It’s a self-assessment tool that uses past sales data to intelligently predict future performance. S2K Sales Forecasting is designed to help you assess the likely demand levels so that you can properly manage your inventory and have adequate resources in place. S2K Forecasting uses advanced algorithms such as expediential smoothing, linear regression, holt-winters, and others that measure data points in a series. These data points populate graphs so that you have a visual representation of the data. For each method, the system will then generate a forecast for each product. Each method is analyzed and the system will automatically recommend the best forecasting algorithm with the highest accuracy. Users can then review the system generated forecast and manually adjust future predictions based on outside forces and sales opportunities. The final adjusted forecast for each item is utilized in S2K Manufacturing for MRP, and S2K Purchasing for enhanced suggested purchasing. S2K performance monitoring tools provide instant analysis on the effectiveness of forecasts against actual sales.

Purchasing

Automated purchasing systems are a key tool in helping businesses reduce inventory and increase sales. They are imperative in helping maintain customer service levels and retaining your customers. Companies that utilize automated forecasting and purchasing tools will also have a strategic advantage in lower costs and increased profits.
The goal with any automated buying solution is to generate purchase order quantities that support the company’s strategic goals for profits and customer service, while doing so in the most efficient and economic fashion. S2K’s Suggested Purchasing application can optimally push order quantities up to get prepaid freight, or to hit vendor minimums, or to cube out a full container, if desired – all while honoring pack sizes. Additionally, it can consider multiple warehouses in the distribution network and check for overstocked items and facilitate stock transfers before buyers place orders to the vendor. By calculating the costs and upcoming demand for each of your items, S2K Suggested Purchasing can tell you if a vendor incentive makes economic sense, and if so, how much more of each item to buy.

Proper Forecasting

By leveraging historical sales data, systems can forecast demand and predict long-range trends, as well as seasonality for each item. VAI’s forecasting system captures seasonality and trends, and calculates how volatile the sales are for each item. No matter how good the forecasting system is, there are always going to be items with volatile and unpredictable swings in sales beyond seasonality and trends. By incorporating sales volatility per item into the safety stock calculations, companies will be covered for sales spikes that occur above the forecasted demand.

S2K Suggested Purchasing evaluates all demand and supply requirements to create time-phased replenishment plans for each product at each location.

Evaluations done by forecasting include:

  • Lead-time length and variability
  • Desired customer service-level requirements
  • Order cycle economics
  • Item level safety-stock and targets
  • Order generation rules and preferences

Take the guesswork out of purchasing

The typical distributor stocks thousands of items at each warehouse. Buyers and planners do not have time to manage each item individually; they need to focus on selected items that require action. S2K’s Suggested Purchasing application performs the complex calculations for each item at each location, and then flags those items with specific conditions hat are beyond user defined tolerances. Most importantly, the company’s capabilities to handle important clients are greatly improved because the investment in inventory versus customer service tradeoff is now visible and controllable.

Import Efficiency

Many distributors have made the strategic decision to gain cost efficiencies by importing products from other parts of the globe. Although this can certainly lower unit costs, it creates complexities in other areas such as significantly increased and variable lead times. This poses a new challenge to buyers and planners, who must now place orders for products that will not arrive for months. Automated purchasing systems can factor in the lead time for each item, at each location, in its calculations of optimized order quantities. They also factor in the variability of the vendor lead time into its safety stock calculations to provide insurance against late deliveries.

S2K Route Management

For companies with their own truck fleet, getting vehicles loaded and on their way can be a very complicated task. Managing routes and stops, inventory allocations, vehicle capacity limits, stacking restrictions, and more must be performed under tight time constraints. S2K Route Manager application helps managers organize routes and ensures that warehouse pickers have the right information, minimizing breakage and maximizing efficiency. As orders are released to the warehouse they are cued up in the route manager screen. The route manager screen displays the quantity, weight and cube for each route with subtotals for dry, refrigerated, and frozen goods. From this screen the user can change the trailer for more capacity, manage stops, allocate inventory, view shorts, allow item substitutions and much more. S2K Route Manager also provides a standard interface to Roadnet for automated truck routing. Once orders are allocated and routed, S2K creates units-of-work (UOW) in reverse stop order to assist pickers in loading each truck. Each UOW is based on pallet TI-HI, max cube, max weight, crush factors, and number of orders per pallet. Powerful inquiry screens allow managers to view the status of each route and the picking progress in real time. Once picked, each UOW can be verified and loaded on the truck. Backload Sheets, Trip Sheets, Bills of Lading, and Invoices?can be generated if required.