Tech for wholesale and distribution

Yes, and it's usually the first thing worth doing. Emails, PDFs, spreadsheets and scanned purchase orders can all be read, matched to the right customer and product codes, and entered into your system. What we build in deliberately is a check step: anything the system isn't confident about goes to a person rather than being guessed at. You get the speed without wearing the cost of a wrong quantity on a big order.

With deciding which system is the truth, which sounds obvious and is where most of these projects actually stall. Once that's settled, the rest is connecting the others to it so they follow rather than argue. If the honest answer is that no current system can hold that role properly, we'll tell you, because building integrations on top of a system that can't be the source of truth just spreads the problem around more efficiently.

Not replace, but it can stop the business depending on their availability. That's what we built at Waterware, an assistant trained on their own product data, specs and history, so any staff member can answer a technical customer question without going to find the one person who knows. Your experienced people still handle the hard calls. What changes is that a Tuesday afternoon question doesn't wait for them to be free.

Technology gives you the chance to catch it, a rule is what actually catches it. MFA on every account, monitoring that spots a login from somewhere odd, and external email warnings so a lookalike address is visible. Then the rule: any change of bank details is confirmed by phone on a number you already had, no exceptions, including when it's urgent, and especially when it's urgent. Urgency is the part they manufacture.

Both. Scanners, label printers, warehouse WiFi and the terminals on the floor are all part of it, and warehouse WiFi in particular is something a lot of providers get wrong, because racking full of stock behaves nothing like an open plan office. If pickers are walking to a dead spot to get a scan to register, that's a coverage design problem and it's fixable.

Managed IT is a fixed monthly fee per person covering helpdesk, monitoring, maintenance, backups and the security baseline. Warehouse network and hardware work is quoted separately because sites differ so much. Automation is quoted per build against a fixed scope. Any number on a website would be made up, so the review costs nothing and you'll have real pricing before you decide.