Every SKU, every location, counted once and right.
How a national wholesale distributor reached 99%+ inventory accuracy with Business Central, barcode-driven warehousing, EDI automation and live margin analytics.
About the client
A national wholesale distributor operating multiple warehouses and serving trading partners by EDI, portal and email. Growth kept adding volume the warehouses could feel every day but the systems could never actually see.
Growth the warehouses could feel but the system could not see
Orders arrived by email, portal and EDI, and too many were re-keyed by hand. Pickers worked from printed lists against inventory records nobody fully trusted, so promises to customers were guesses. Freight and rebates blurred true margin, and every new warehouse made the same problems bigger.
Business Central built for the dock door
Alphavima implemented Business Central with directed warehousing: barcode scanning drives receiving, put-away, picking and counts, which is where 99%+ accuracy comes from. EDI was automated end to end, so trading-partner orders, confirmations and invoices flow without a keyboard.
With inventory trustworthy, available-to-promise became real: customer service quotes dates from the system, not from hope. Power BI margin analytics net freight, rebates and pricing into true profitability by customer and SKU, and the picture repeats identically at every warehouse the business adds.
From re-keyed orders to touchless flow
Discovery & data
Items, partners and pricing rationalised before migration.
Finance & orders
Business Central live with EDI automation for top partners.
Barcode rollout
Directed picking and cycle counts, site by site.
Margin analytics
Power BI profitability live across the network.
What changed
- Manual order entry and re-keying
- Paper picking, untrusted counts
- Promises made on guesswork
- Margin blurred by freight and rebates
- Touchless EDI and portal order flow
- Barcode accuracy at 99%+
- Real available-to-promise
- Live margin by customer and SKU
“We used to argue about what was on the shelf. Now the shelf answers for itself, and our promises hold.”
Questions about projects like this
Can Business Central handle multi-warehouse distribution?
Yes. Locations, transfers, directed put-away and picking are native, and the model scales as sites are added.
How hard is EDI with Business Central?
Mature connectors make the common documents, orders, ASNs, invoices, a configuration exercise for most trading partners.
What accuracy improvement is realistic?
Barcode-driven warehousing with disciplined cycle counting sustains high-90s accuracy; the discipline matters as much as the software, and we implement both.
We are outgrowing QuickBooks. Is this the step?
This pattern is exactly that step: distributors who outgrow entry-level accounting move to Business Central for inventory truth and touchless orders.