Inform ERP

Inform ERP by DDI System is a highly configurable distribution management solution, distinctively combining daily operations, CRM, eCommerce, mobility, and advanced reporting in one system.

Build stronger relationships with your most important asset, your customers. Inform ERP manages customer engagement, a crucial strategy in the growing digital economy. By combining CRM with daily operations, contact-level vital signs and activity history are used where they have the most impact – order entry, quoting, delivery inquiry, and customer service.

Task management, calendaring and dashboard analytics ensure that distribution operations continually exceed performance goals. Market-aware feature sets benefit janitorial and sanitation, paper and packaging, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, showroom, fluid power, restaurant equipment and industrial suppliers.

Make Every Connection Count

Inform goes beyond operational excellence with Inform Engage – an innovative blend of robust connectivity tools designed to keep distributors aligned with their customers 24/7. Inform Engage harnesses the power of CRM, Mobility and eCommerce to keep your customers at the forefront of every engagement to continuously drive exceptional customer care.

CRM - Elevate and Strengthen Customer Relationships

Salespeople and distributors with the right information, at the right time, can strengthen customer relationships, incite loyalty, and provide better service than their competitors. Inform ERP Software bridges the gap between an ERP, the system that optimizes business operations, and CRM, the system that maximizes relationships with customers and potential customers.

Inform’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools provide conversational touch points like personal notes, contact activity history, open tasks, purchase history, order status, and related selling opportunities. Using these tools, your team can proactively engage and connect with customers on a personal level, ensuring you remain a distributor of choice.

Mobility - Access Customer Specific Data On-the-Go

Inform mobility gives ERP users a competitive advantage with real-time access to customer data to elevate engagement and win against the competition. Regardless of your location, Inform mobility tools propel relationships by delivering deep insight into information that drives a superior customer service experience – exciting existing customers and winning new ones.

DDI’s mobile strategy incorporates two solutions that complement Inform: MobiOrder, delivers deep insight into sales territories, customers, contacts, activities, order entry and quotes. QuickOrder is a ‘lightweight’ smartphone app that adds value to your customers business by providing Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI).

eCommerce - Explore eCommerce to Compete With Online Digital Giants

Inform eCommerce is designed to support online business as a core business component to service customers 24/7. Inform eCommerce provides a seamlessly connected, mobile optimized solution for counter sales, order management, inventory, customer-specific pricing, merchandising, field sales teams.

DDI’s unified platform quickly deploys a smartphone-ready storefront powered by real-time information from Inform ERP. Inform serves as your ‘Product Content Center’ for organizing and delivering images, spec sheets, and related up-sell items, all with real-time stock and pricing. Take advantage of customer specific workflows, including contract catalogs, budgets, shopping lists and re-order history.

Remarkable Insight Into Your Inventory

Inform focuses on identifying exceptions in product demand. Our demand management toolkit guides you to increasingly better inventory performance. More turns, minimized overstock, and true control over multi-location inventory and forecasts.

• Outstanding order fill rates
• Increase inventory turns
• Streamline multi-location inventory
• Improve GMROI

Inform ERP distribution software’s Product Analysis screen reveals every aspect of any product, including stock, non-stock, service or labor items. Explore all the detail of your inventory’s ‘in-transit’ information, including availability, open orders, purchase orders, backorders, branch transfers, and returned goods, for a complete picture of your inventory status.

Demand Forecasting & Purchasing

Inform ERP’s professional demand forecasting tools turn purchasing managers into inventory control experts. Powerful forecast algorithms, easy-to-use exception management, and unique, intuitive purchasing screens provide buyers with tools unavailable in other ERP systems. Achieve high customer order fill rates while increasing inventory turns. See the results in year-over-year profit and cash-flow improvement.

• Reduce inventory levels by up to 25 percent
• Reduce inventory carrying costs
• Eliminate dead and inactive stock
• Minimize the time spent on replenishment
• Inform ERP Demand Planning

Unusual Demand Management

• Sporadic demand forecasting
• Recurring demand forecasting
• Seasonal and slow-moving product optimization
• Warehouse overstock balancing
• Real-time vendor purchase summary
• Interactive, multi-location purchase order projection

Unparalleled Reporting Capabilities

The power to make better, faster decisions is at your fingertips with Inform’s powerful and intuitive reporting functions. Gain detailed insight into every aspect of your business with extremely powerful tools built right into our software eliminating the use of third party tools.

Business Performance Dashboards

• New dashboard layout allows every user to create a customizable dashboard of the sales and inventory metrics important to them.
• Ongoing additions to Inform’s Advanced Report Writer add more files, fields, and records joins. Added additional dynamic date selection options, including ‘Next Business Day’.
• Added Stock Transfer In/Out fields to the Inventory Pivot Table Cube Editor.
• New Pivot Table Save As option to craft new cubes based on existing layouts.

Sophisticated Reporting That Is Remarkably Easy to Use

From our years of experience working with distributors, we’ve listened to the difficulties they face with their current software systems. The most challenging problem we hear relates to quality analysis. If you want unprecedented insight into your business’s current, future and past metrics, strengths and weaknesses, Inform ERP is your software solution, providing easy-to-access information in customizable drill-down menus.

Advanced Reporting Tools

Take your reporting even farther with custom reports that are built with just a few clicks of the mouse. Once built, you can save for future use, export to view in other applications and schedule to have delivered to your mobile devices as often as you need them. You can also choose from more than 50 pre-built reports from our ARW Library to download and import into Inform.

Inform ERP Specializes in Market Specific Pricing Models

Our market specific pricing systems are highly tuned and based on a deep understanding of pricing in our customer’s vertical markets. Combined with our meticulous data collection and conversion of pricing models, our users experience a nearly immediate return on their ERP investment.

• Margin-of-last-sale automation and sales history management for paper, packaging, and janitorial distributors.
• Price Matrix using list, discount, markup and multipliers for electrical, plumbing, and industrial distributors.
• SPA and rebated cost contracts.
• Lot pricing, project and room bundles for quoting, purchasing, and shipping groups of products.
• Quotation-based pricing and quote management.

‘Margin-Manager’ Sales History Based Pricing

Sales history based pricing automatically maintains sell prices based upon the previous sales’ profit margin. This pricing structure, critical to the operational efficiency of paper, packaging, janitorial, and maintenance supply distributors, allows you to set up personalized pricing for each customer. Prevent margin leakage and expect to increase gross profits by tens of thousands annually.

Price Matrix

Multi dimensional price flexibility with grouping by price group, product line, and product, combined with customer category, customer, job, and vendor. Easily set up unlimited scenarios to maximize profitability, and support customer-specific promotions. Reduce employee errors and achieve an optimal balance between stock levels and pricing. Updating costs is automated with Inform ‘Product Import’ templates.

Contract Pricing, Special Pricing Allowances & Vendor Rebate Reporting

Keep your prices competitive by using price contracts to apply time-sensitive vendor rebates to selected customers. Never miss a penny in rebates receivable. Contracts store and manage customer net pricing, rebated costs and sales load. Contract prices are displayed and used in sales and purchase orders until the contract expires.

Cost Automation

Quickly and easily import hundreds or thousands of products, update list prices and costs, and let Inform recalculate selling prices using our multi-tiered price matrix. Import customer pricing contracts and manufacturers’ rebate pricing.

Pricing Management

• ‘Competitive Pricing’ view, where all available deals and customer pricing results are immediately visible for pricing another customer. This view is available in sales order entry and products master when enabled in the company master.
• Assign a contract price record to an entire customer category
• Added ‘Vendor’ and ‘Major Group’ to Inform’s ‘Price Matrix’ structure
• Add branch criteria to the ‘Purchasing Price Matrix’
• New sales order line-item price contract assignment