3 Ways iControl’s DSD Software Empowers You & Your Vendors

We’ll cover in this post a few of the key reasons why DSD solutions are crucial and how the Empower DSD^TM suite takes the hassle and pain out of DSD, so you can focus on what matters—your customers! iControl has built our business by supporting some of the largest brands on the planet and have created Empower DSD to a mobile and software to all size companies looking for a better solutions that will increase the bottom line, reduce wasted time, and help you understand your business better than ever possible before.

Direct Store Deliver is a vital, beneficial, and profitable piece of the retail supply chain. However, it comes with a certain set of challenges both for the operators and administrators. While many know the importance of measuring certain metrics and tracking we don’t know where to even start… With Empower DSD we’ve put it all together in a single package for you to plug & play to start improving your processes and increase profits almost overnight.

Let us explain how Empower DSD^TM does this in just 3 easy steps:

1) Data Synchronization

“Sync your data, don’t sink your bottom line.”

With globalization came an amazing ability for companies to work across borders and with new partners easily at any given time—but this also came with MAJOR challenges in working with so many disparate partners. The most central of those is that every company has their own “language” and it works great for that company internally. However, that doesn’t translate very well to your business “language” and let alone when you start working with 50+ different distributors or brands in different geographies who bring their own product keys, reporting systems, tracking methods, and their general methodology.

Empower DSD^TM allows for you ALL of your vendors to be integrated into a single system—one that can ‘translate’ those different languages so that your entire team can understand and manage them easily. We synchronize data between retailer and suppliers by ensuring that requests to update data such as item cost and retail, new item setups, and promotional allowances are submitted, approved and implemented in our centralized, collaborative portal.
It’s clear Data Sync is important, but almost just as important is DATA INTEGRITY.

This is one of the major differentiators between Empower DSD^TM and any other products on the market is that we are proactively auditing all of this data in real-time for 100% accuracy before invoices are even generated. We do this by comparing data sets daily to ensure any variances are correct at any given time.

2) Automation & Processing

“Item master data management is the number one current technology where investment has been going and will go in the future”
-Gartner Annual Report on the State of Retail Technology

Direct Store Delivery software and even DSD trends have evolved drastically over the past 5 years—but we’re just at the beginning of this major shift in the industry toward a software first solution. iControl’s Empower DSD^TM has a platform of integrated modules designed to first simplify and automate workflows and transactions, so that trading partners can shift their focus to performance & profit optimization.

Empower DSD^TM focuses on creating workflow automation and reporting—taking 90% of the workload. A consolidated point of entry for all product information into a retailer’s ecosystem, ensuring the integrity of a retailer’s catalog, the validity of the information in it, keeping all data up to date, ensuring merchants and stores have the information necessary to do their jobs well–without manual intervention.

3) Dashboards & Reporting Subscriptions

All of this sounds helpful on the surface, but the real questions for you as the operators is “How do I use this?”. That’s a great question, and one our team understands deeply—we come from diverse backgrounds around the industry and one thing we all know too well is that

“If a software isn’t easy to use, no one is going to use it.”

Empower DSD^TM is built to make it as easy as possible to just plug and play! Both your team and your key partners will see the benefits of our DSD solutions almost immediately. With DSD software you can immediately (and even on mobile!) see automated reporting and scorecards generated daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly to track progress and give you the insights to understand your business better than anyone in the world.

We also believe that sales scorecards should provide trading partners with access to sales and even sources of those sales – providing deeper insights into those factors impacting top line sales performance. iControl’s assortment optimization analysis creates opportunities for additional distribution and sales.

With our reporting and metrics dashboards the Empower DSD^TM tools measure your DSD the same way as a warehouse! Empowering Retailers and Suppliers to Achieve Superior DSD Outcomes with less Hassle! Our Empower DSD^TM suite takes the hassle and pain out of DSD, so our customers are empowered to focus on what matters. Their customers.