How many times have you taken a top IT employee and assigned them to a tortuous network problem or swoop in to replace a failing server? Each time you do, you lose a little bit of focus on the key priorities of your distribution business.

Leveraging the expertise of a distribution-centric IT team gives your staff the freedom and resources to focus on the areas that really matter to you: revenue growth, value added services, on-time shipments, vendor negotiations and customer satisfaction.

They say time is money, and in distribution, margins are thin. What is the opportunity cost to your business of working our everyday IT issues? Many distributors find that they lack the expertise to build an experienced and scalable IT team. Unfortunately, working through your IT strategy and issues with an inexperienced IT team or non-IT professionals may be costing you thousands of dollars each month in slow sales and late customer service.

Even distributors who have the time and ability to recruit, hire and train a world-class IT department still face problems. Your top team is better suited for your high-level strategic planning and support of growth initiatives, not troubleshooting devices and tending to software support issues.

Letting the experienced team at Tridex Systems handle your routine IT issues and tasks is an affordable and scalable solution. Additionally, you’ll gain confidence knowing that your network operates at top performance, your issues are addressed quickly and your team can focus on the goals of your company.

Studies by CompTIA show that over half the companies they surveyed report using managed IT services to give their teams more time to focus on revenue-generating activity. Most companies (62%) were so happy with their results that they intend to increase their use of managed services.

Delegating some range of tasks to an outsourced team can decrease your total IT costs. Additionally, your new investments in IT are more cost effective with a managed IT team compared to increasing your own staff.

At Tridex Systems, we can leverage economies of scale and efficiencies that are not available to smaller, internal teams. Your team is incredibly competent and dedicated; however, we can apply our expertise and solution set from our experience with many similar distributors who are running distribution ERP systems. We can consolidate our hiring and purchasing processes across all of our ERP users and pass those savings on to you.

Every distributor we work with expands our experience and knowledge base, which allows us to respond to your issues and implement new strategies as quickly as possible. We’ve been able to recruit some of the top ERP talent for a very deep bench. We can also leverage our many partnerships and integrations, and enlist the help of software publisher development and support teams which gives us a clear advantage in service and scale than any single IT organization could achieve on their own.

This depth in technology and the distribution industry increases our efficiencies and helps us apply industry best practices across all of our clients. You can then continue to focus on scaling up your growth and top-line revenues instead of increasing headcount and hardware.

The CompTIA report showed more savings with regard to operating costs:

• 46 percent of managed IT service users have cut their annual IT costs by 25 percent or more.
• 50 percent of managed IT service users have cut their annual IT costs between 1 percent and 24 percent.

Every single Tridex Systems employee is trained to think like a distributor. We know that labor costs represent one of the largest – if not the largest – sources of operational costs. Running a distribution business requires a pretty hefty investment into recruiting and training the best employees. You are also responsible for vacation and sick days, employee turnover and HR management issues.

Sooner or later, either due to growth or the loss of a key employee, you will need to recruit your next IT employee. At that point you should ask your team if you think you really need a full-time employee. This is rarely the case in distribution. Sometimes you might really only need a few hours each week to support your new growth and initiatives. Unfortunately, hiring a new full-time employee also gives you the full-time burden of salary, benefits and management applied to a part-time problem. If you hire a part-time employee, you save costs, but you almost never get the dedication and experience you require.

Tridex Systems can give you the precise amount of experience, hours and support you need. Many distributors find that they can save 40% or more on their operating costs compared to the cost of hiring their own team. And you’ll rest easy knowing that our expert level of support can continue to scale with your needs.

Your plans and problems with distribution technology can be unpredictable. The industry changes quickly and to remain competitive you must respond immediately. Unfortunately, by the time you realize you need an IT specialist—network administrators, UNIX/LINIX admins, Progress experts, distribution software experts—in a particular area it might be too late to recruit and hire them cost effectively.

Emergencies and competitive threats are never planned. They force you to pry expert resources from the most important areas of your organization. That in turn reduces your ability to serve your current customers and attract new ones. Your employees suffer as well with less support for their everyday issues.

Many distributors, especially small-to-medium sized businesses, struggle taking on the additional costs of CIO-level talent. You may not need that expert talent after a particular project is completed. Tridex Systems can bring in our experts as you need them. This gives you access to some of the best talent in the world of distribution technology to augment your current team just in time.

You face competition from every corner as a distributor—overseas manufacturers, Amazon, online retail, new competitive branches in your key locations and more. In order to maintain your competitive advantage, you must gain control over a number of very complex functions and technologies like enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain and logistics management, ordering, replenishment, e-commerce, picking, packing, shipping, customer relationship management (CRM), pricing, business intelligence and more.

Keeping up with technology provides important competitive advantages. Unfortunately, it is usually not within the core capabilities of a distribution business to track new technology trends.

Outsourcing to a qualified IT partner can help you take advantage of the latest technology while getting your team up to speed quickly with consistent training and experience across many different organizations. We have experts in the latest hardware, software, cloud platforms and network applications and can help you decide which investments provide you with the greatest advantages.

Tridex Systems understands how to deal with the unusual aspects of a wholesale distribution business and apply our expertise to emerging problems to give you new competitive advantages. Our solutions are built around your ERP with tight integrations and end-user expertise to help every area of your business from analytics to inventory to workflow improvement.

Forrester Research has reported that 73% of companies have experienced a major disruption to their business in the past five years. The average cost of downtime across all respondents was $212,100 per hour and the average cost for a small-to-medium sized business was $12,500 per hour.

Most of these problems were completely preventable with a reliable managed IT service provider. The issues that caused downtime were often related to power, hardware, software and natural disaster.

Your network is the central nervous system of your company and even a small amount of downtime reduces your profitability. When you are offline, your customers and employees are frustrated and you are stalled from closing new sales. In fact, there are many ways you can lose money from downtime:

• Your sales reps cannot serve customers or close new deals without access to client records
• Employees fail to complete their work without access to data and software
• Many companies experience a partial data loss from emergencies if they don’t have a solid disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
• Frustrated customers leave, leading to even more lost revenue.

Reducing downtime with internal resources is difficult and expensive. Your team must identify root causes, buy hardware and study new technology developments. Tridex Systems helps you diagnose issues, create a stable network to minimize your downtime and help you increase your total productivity.

We are committed to more than just improved uptime. The distributors we work with have often found that working alone with the technology that they’ve invested in to improve their business operations actually decreases their productivity because their teams don’t have a well-rounded level of expertise, training, support and focus. By working with Tridex Systems you gain a partner who specializes in the complex technology available in wholesale distribution along with daily hands-on application support. We help you plan, implement and maintain systems that can lead to new productivity gains.

The best employees want to do their best; however, in a modern distribution environment, that also requires the best technology, software and tools. According to a recent survey of more than 1,200 people, Premiere Global Services, Inc. found the more employees wanted better technology from their employers than wanted better team organization or continuing educational support. The types of technologies they wanted included tablet computers (23.7%), project management tools (15.1%), productivity apps (14.5%), analytics software (11.9%) and team collaboration workspaces (11.1%).

Your employees’ need represent new challenges. How do you make their computers and workstations as fast as possible? How do you minimize downtime? How do you deal with new requirements for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and regulation compliance? How can you make sure your software works the way it should from day one?

Tridex Systems can help you recruit and retain the best employees by exceeding their expectations with support, training, robust environments and up-to-day technology all while lowering your operating costs.

How many hours do you spend on hold with your technology vendors?

One of the benefits of working with Tridex Systems is leveraging your experience with multiple vendors at the highest level. We are able to pool our experiences and resources to create relationships that most single organizations cannot cultivate. This includes relationships with Infor, Progress, Microsoft, cloud-technology providers, hardware manufacturers and others.

The bottom line is that you and your team will experience better end-user support, more responsive interactions, direct help from our team, intervention and escalation paths and overall faster resolution times. All of this saves your company time and money.

Working alone with your technology vendors makes it difficult to know if you’re getting the best contract and service. We can help you maximize your value by applying our experience and practices across multiple distributors.

And rest assured that you’ll never give up control of your relationships. In fact, our clients feel like they have more control, not less, when they involve our experts. Whether it’s better terms, better deals, better service or any other area in which you need help, you’ll have the final say in a better situation.