This is a guest post by Annie Eissler from MITS. NSA has partnered with MITS to provide our customers with a business intelligence solution that offers distributor analytics.

We’ve talked with a lot of wholesale distributors over the decades and have gleaned some real nuggets of wisdom along the way.  We’re happy to share some of these with you in our ‘tips for success with distributor analytics’ blog post series, and in our latest ebook.

The first tip is all about picking the right tool for the job. Imagine that you’re building an addition on to your house; you probably wouldn’t pass over your power tools for your grandfather’s hand planer and saw. Well, it’s just as critical to pick the right tool when you want to understand what’s happening in your wholesale distribution business.

Using the reporting tools that come with your ERP system to get business-critical information is like cutting each piece of lumber and banging in each nail by hand—slow, unprecise, and sometimes painful!  Some business intelligence solutions, even those supposedly designed for ERP reporting, still require a lot of costly and time-consuming hand work to get useful results.

Distributor Analytics Tools Provide Real-Time Insight

In an increasingly complex and competitive world you just can’t afford to wait days for reports, sift through mountains of paper, or spend days writing queries to get to a few nuggets of information. Your team needs real-time insight into the metrics that matter most for your business—and for that you need to break out the power tools. Tools like MITS Distributor Analytics, which sit on top of your ERP and deliver point and click access to your business information via role-based dashboards, scorecards, and reports.

The table below shows the key differences between an ERP system, general business intelligence software, and a solution like MITS—a package that is tailor made to deliver insight and value right ‘out of the box’ for wholesale distribution businesses like yours.