Solutions for Wholesale Distribution
Three things distributors tell us are getting harder: answering the customer, buying the right inventory at the right time, and getting through the day without working around the system. Start with the one you recognise.
Three things that get harder as the operation grows
More SKUs, more locations, more vendors, more channels. The way you win — service — gets harder to sustain. These are the three places distributors tell us it shows up first.
Answer the customer without the chase
A customer is on the phone asking where their order is. Answering it can mean involving someone else, or calling them back. Same for a quote, a price, or whether the thing is in stock. The information exists — getting to it takes another person, another report, or another step.
- Customer purchase history inside the order — ranked, with every date
- Item status — on hand, available to sell, on backorder, across locations
- Order and backorder status without a callback
- Customer-specific price levels applied at order entry
- PrismView™ for the internal half — filtered, grouped, drilled to the transaction, and saved for that person
Carry the right inventory and buy at the right time
Too much of one thing and not enough of another. Duplicate items. Slow movers. Emergency fill-ins. Inventory ties up real working capital, and small purchasing decisions accumulate into turns, shortages and carrying cost.
- Vendor purchase history grouped over years — what each one has actually been charging you
- Inventory valuation on demand, including weighted average receipt cost
- Landed cost carried on the item
- Catalog items kept separate from stocked inventory
- Backorder control — you decide what happens when an order is short
Vendor lead times and what a supplier has on the shelf are outside any ERP’s control, and we will not pretend otherwise. What Centerprism shows you is your own purchasing history and inventory position.
Operations & Commerce
Spend less of the day working around the system
An order gets keyed once when it is taken and again somewhere downstream. A report gets rebuilt every morning because yesterday’s is already stale. Prices get checked by hand. And somewhere in the middle there is a spreadsheet running alongside the system, kept up by one person, because the system will not hold what it needs to hold.
Good people are hard to find and hard to keep. That is not a software problem. How much of a capable person’s day goes to working around the system is.
- Saved views instead of rebuilt reports — on the live database, not an export
- Vendor price files imported rather than keyed
- Screens configured to the person doing the job — tell us the fields they actually use
- Repair, rental and field service running against the same inventory, not a parallel system
This is about capacity, not headcount. We will not put an hours-saved figure on it until a customer story supports one.
PrismView™ & AnalyticsSolutions by category
Four areas, one system. Ask us what is in the base and what is licensed separately — you will get a straight answer, in writing.
Sales & Customer Management
Quote it, take the order, price it to the customer, and see what they bought last time.
Explore Sales
Operations & Commerce
Stock it across locations, control backorders, and buy against real purchasing history.
Explore Operations
Finance & Analytics
Financials, plus PrismView™ — a live spreadsheet sitting on your database.
Explore Finance
Field Operations & Mobile
Pick, receive and count on the floor; dispatch field service against the same inventory.
Explore Field Ops
One system, one interface, one number to call
A distribution business runs the same cycle over and over. You sell something, you take the order, you price it, you stock it, you buy more. Centerprism runs that cycle on one database — the same item, the same customer, the same price, whichever screen you are on. When those live in separate systems, somebody spends their day keeping the pieces in agreement.
- The same records behind the order, the item, the price and the customer
- Distribution-specific work is part of the system — catalog vs. stocked items, kits and assemblies, customer pricing, vendor price files, backorders
- It runs where you want it — your server, a data center, Azure or AWS
- Fixed-fee implementation, traditional licensing with annual support, and a person in the U.S. on the phone
This describes the core distribution work being connected. It is not a claim that every capability ships in one package — ask us for the list and we will send it.
Frequently asked questions
Good to KnowBring us the question that takes too long
A customer’s order status, what a vendor has been charging you, what is sitting on the shelf. Tell us the one that costs you most and we will show you it being answered on screen.
