Stop running your warehouse on yesterday’s count
Navisiontech configures Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for mid-market wholesale distributors, so what you have on the shelf, what you have promised to customers, and what you can ship today are the same number, updated in something close to real time.
We’re the right call when you’re too big for QuickBooks Wholesale and too small to absorb an SAP implementation.
The configuration that makes the difference
Business Central is a generic ERP out of the box. Distribution happens in seven specific places. Here is how Navisiontech configures each one for mid-market distributors.
Inventory you can actually sell from
If your inventory count is wrong, everything downstream is wrong. Wrong promises to customers. Wrong replenishment orders. Wrong stockout alerts. Most mid-market distributors we walk into have an “official” inventory count and a “real” inventory count, and the gap between them fills the expediting time of three people every week.
We configure Business Central with bin-level accuracy, lot and serial discipline where regulation demands it, and cycle counting that runs inside the daily workflow. Customer service stops hedging on availability. Sales stops promising stock that isn’t there.
Bin-level accuracy across multiple warehouses
Cycle counting integrated into daily workflow
Lot, serial, and expiration tracking
Real-time visibility across all locations
The time between order and truck
The number of hours between an order arriving and a truck leaving the dock is the single metric that decides if your customers keep buying from you. Cut it in half and you keep customers you would have lost. Add a day and you lose customers you would have kept.
The configuration of pick paths, batch and wave logic, packaging rules, and carrier selection drives that number more than any other thing. We tune all of it together, not as separate projects.
Wave and batch picking optimization
Auto-packaging suggestions by SKU
Mobile pick and pack on handhelds (Tasklet)
Carrier rate shopping at the pack station
Pricing that holds up under a phone call
Customer A pays list. Customer B pays contract. Customer C gets a 12% override on certain SKUs from Tuesday through Friday because of a promotion that started in 2019. Your salespeople need to know the right price in the moment, every time. If pricing logic lives in spreadsheets and tribal knowledge, salespeople hedge and customers get inconsistent quotes.
We configure Business Central so list, contract, volume tier, and promo pricing all flow through the same waterfall, and your team quotes with confidence instead of guessing.
Customer pricing groups and contracts
Trade promotions with date ranges and SKU lists
Volume tier pricing with effective dates
Override approval workflows over a threshold
Orders that arrive five different ways
EDI from your major retail accounts. A B2B portal you built three years ago. An e-commerce site. Email PDFs from smaller customers. And the phone. If each channel writes to a different system, your fulfillment team is reconciling instead of fulfilling.
We configure Business Central so every channel writes to one order book, with channel-specific routing, validation, and exception handling. The team stops asking “which system has this order” and starts asking “when can we ship it.”
EDI for major retailer and OEM accounts (Lanham)
E-commerce integration (Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento)
CSR order entry with live availability
B2B portal sync
Email-PDF order capture with OCR
Replenishment that doesn’t surprise you
Stocking the right products at the right warehouses is a math problem dressed up as an art. Distributors who get it right have lower working capital and higher service levels. Distributors who get it wrong are paying interest on inventory that won’t sell, and stocking out of items that would have.
We configure forecasting at the SKU and warehouse level with seasonality, customer-specific lead times, and supplier reliability factors baked into the math. Replenishment suggestions feed straight into your purchasing workflow.
SKU and warehouse-level forecasting
Supplier lead time tracking
Min/max with safety stock optimization
Replenishment suggestions feeding straight to POs
Returns that stop being a black hole
Returns are the part of the business everyone hopes won’t happen and nobody designs the system for. Then they’re 8% of revenue and a complete mystery to finance. Inventory in disposition limbo. Credits issued late. Customers asking where their refund is.
We configure RMA workflows with disposition rules (restock, refurbish, scrap, return-to-vendor), automated credit memos, and reverse logistics tracking. Returns become a process, not a fire drill.
RMA creation from any channel
Credit memo automation
Disposition rules by product and reason
Reverse logistics carrier integration
Freight that stops bleeding margin
Freight is the line item most often surprised by at month-end and most often handed off to a 3PL who doesn’t optimize for you. Carrier rates change weekly. Service levels are mismatched to customer SLAs. Accessorials show up on the invoice you didn’t expect.
We configure Business Central to compare carriers at pack time, suggest the cheapest option that meets the customer’s service level, accrue freight cost on every shipment, and reconcile to carrier invoices automatically. Freight stops being a black box and becomes a real cost lever.
Carrier rate shopping at pack station
Freight cost accrual per shipment
LTL and 3PL portal integrations
Service level vs cost trade-off rules
Carrier invoice reconciliation
When sales, warehouse, and finance share one database
These aren’t predictions. They’re outcomes we’ve watched repeat across mid-market distribution implementations.
What changed
The situation in 2021
Orders arrived through five channels and got rekeyed into the ERP by hand. Inventory accuracy ran around 84%, low enough that sales reps stopped trusting on-hand numbers and started “calling the warehouse” before quoting. Freight chargebacks from the largest OEM customer averaged $4,200 a month for label and ASN violations. Returns sat in a corner of DC-01 for an average of 14 days before a credit memo was issued. Customer-specific pricing lived in three places that didn’t agree.
What we did
Navisiontech ran a three-week DC walk across all four sites and proposed a nine-month phased implementation. Finance, inventory, and the order book went live in month three. EDI and the B2B portal joined in month five. Warehouse mobility, carrier rate shopping, and the RMA workflow followed in month eight. A two-month stabilization window separated each phase.
The stack we deployed
Business Central Premium as the core. Tasklet Mobile WMS for receiving, picking, packing, and counting. Lanham EDI for the OEM customer’s 850/855/856/810/940/945 documents. Insight Works for warehouse productivity and license plates. Power BI for the sales and operations dashboards. Carrier rate shopping integrated at the pack station. EasyEFT for card-not-present B2B payments.
Where AI helps a distributor, and where it doesn’t
AI is currently being sold as a solution to every distribution problem. It isn’t. For a handful of specific, well-bounded problems, it’s genuinely useful, once your data is clean enough to feed it. Here’s how we sort that with clients.
How Pricing Works
① Discovery Assessment ($20,000 Fixed Fee) → ② Fixed-Price Proposal → ③ Core | Essential | Advanced
Who you’ll actually work with
ERP implementations are people projects with software underneath. Here is the structure of the team you’d meet on a Navisiontech engagement, and what each role is accountable for from day one through the years after go-live.
REAL STORIES. REAL RESULTS. REAL GROWTH.
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