The manufacturing industry is all about transforming raw materials into new products. It can take mechanical, chemical, or even manual processes to get the final products ready. It also includes assembling components into new and complex products. Manufacturing companies can sell their goods both ways – either to end customers or to wholesale distributors. Generally, most manufacturing companies have multiple distributors who sell their products to their end customers. At times, managing production requests from a large number of distributors across different channels becomes cumbersome. This is where a B2B portal for manufacturers comes in handy.
So, if you are a manufacturing company’s owner this post is for you. This post will walk you through some main challenges companies face in manufacturing order management. You’ll also learn how a B2B portal for manufacturers can help overcome them.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Challenge 1 – Trouble Managing Orders across Different Channels
When your different distributors place production requests across different channels, their management turns tedious. For instance, if one of your distributors places an order with you over the phone, the other one does it via email, while the other one sends an SMS.
In this case, you may have to manage all the incoming orders you receive from different channels. There are chances that you miss out on fulfilling any as you failed to count that. Maintaining all these orders’ details in spreadsheets may lead to more errors in entries, increase complexity, and decrease efficiency.
Solution – By integrating a B2B portal for manufacturers, you can get all your distributors’ orders from different channels right in one place. By centralizing their incoming orders details on a single dashboard, you can have a better overview and visibility. This helps you reduce errors and improve your order fulfillment process.
Challenge 2 – Managing Individual Distributors’ Records and Histories
There may be some instances where you have faced issues with your particular distributors. You may also have taken some actions to eradicate those issues to bring things back to normal. Managing all your distributors’ records and past transactions traditionally on paper or in spreadsheets may cause problems. In case of any issue with a particular distributor, digging down into their record can be time-consuming. As a result, your company may face not only order fulfillment delays and roadblocks but also face a slump in sales eventually.
Solution – A B2B portal for manufacturers lets you manage individual distributors’ records, issues from the past, their solutions, transaction details, etc., from within a single place.
Challenge 3 – Limited-Time Availability
Suppose you have 500 distributors, and 150 out of them generally place orders only over the phone. There may be times when you are not available to take their calls during working hours. Further, they may restrain themselves from calling you any time other than in your working hours. It may render you available only for a limited time to take orders or answer any queries.
At times, it may lead to delays in order processing also. This is because you may receive the orders over the business phone system a day later as you were unavailable for the call from the distributor. Furthermore, there may be instances of errors in order count or other specifications due to erroneous entries in a hurry. Even if your distributors place orders via email, there are chances that their emails may land in spam sometimes and go unnoticed.
Coming to distributors, they may also not be able to view or change their placed order details instantly in case of any errors. Instead, they’ll have to go through the long chain of communication to fix the error or reconfirm the details.
Solution – A B2B portal for manufacturers helps you solve this problem completely. By providing every distributor with their log-in credentials, you can let them log in to your portal and place orders at any time. This helps you get the orders anytime and every time, and you can process orders on a particular day accordingly without delays or issues.
It also benefits distributors as they can easily view and manage their order details and edit them easily without any need to contact you.
Challenge 4 – Invoice Management
When a distributor places orders of different sizes across one or two different channels, invoice management becomes a challenge. There are times you may have to trace all the orders that your distributor has placed across different channels and generate invoices for them.
Solution – If you use a B2B portal for manufacturers, you can manage invoices better and more easily. You can simply generate invoices for each order any distributor places from within the portal. The distributor can then view and download that invoice and make payments via any of the payment options you offer right away. They can also upload the proof of transaction right in the portal. You can generate a receipt for the same payment right away for them to download for future reference. This eliminates the need to email or fax the invoices and receipts individually after payments to distributors.
This way, you need not keep a separate sheet to track each distributors’ paid and due invoices. As each distributor can pay instantly and you can issue invoice receipts for the same – all from within the portal.
Hire CRMJetty – Get Your Best Web Portal Ready
If you are also in the manufacturing industry and looking for a way to manage your distributors, CRMJetty has got the right portal solution for you. Our web portal is a ready-to-integrate solution that you can also configure to fit your manufacturing business logic.
With the portal integrated into your CRM, you can give your distributors, and vendors access to your relevant business repositories. You can let them generate invoices, pay bills, view reports of products they ordered in a period, and more through a secure log-in.
We also offer different types of services as per your business requirements. If our launch-ready portal suits your requirements, you can integrate it and start your manufacturing order management straight away. If your requirements are slightly different from our portal’s features, our development team can customize our portal. We can also update your existing portal by upgrading technology or migrating it to the latest technology. If you need, we can also build an exclusive or bespoke custom B2B portal for manufacturers to help you with manufacturing order management.
We are a bunch of skilled and certified portal developers who have been in the portal industry for over 14 years now. We are already catering to the portal requirements of over 11 countries and have completed over 50 custom integration projects so far. With us, you can stay assured you’ll get the best portal for your manufacturing business that matches your expectations in all aspects.
So, let’s connect to get your portal off the ground and make it a success!
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