In Brief
Many distributors have some form of a data warehouse in place, but it is usually limited in its ability to enable transformation.
Here are seven signs your data platform may be more of a roadblock than an asset for your distribution business.
Distributors built a lot of the legacy data platforms in place today to meet the needs of the finance team. Their primary use is to generate monthly reports, support accounting functions, and track basic financial KPIs.
But pricing teams, sales reps, and supply chain leaders also need access to data for better decision-making. Unfortunately, they’re stuck working around a system that wasn’t built for them. One of our client’s data warehouses worked great for their finance team. But it made it nearly impossible for sales to track customer behavior or for their pricing teams to run margin analysis.
As your distribution business evolves, your platform needs to evolve with it. You need a data platform that can enable forecasting, customer segmentation, and pricing analytics. If it can’t support AI tools, it’s time to shift gears.
If users are exporting data to Excel so they can clean up reports or make them more accurate, your platform isn’t doing its job. These workarounds introduce errors, waste time, and destroy trust in the data. Manual fixes also tend to make the problem worse over time.
They also slow the business down. Sales and operations shouldn’t have to wait days or weeks to get the data they need. What’s more, if every department is bringing its own version of your numbers to meetings, your data foundation needs to be fixed.
In many distributors, data is locked away in a spot that only a handful of IT or finance staff know how to access and use it. Everyone else has to submit a ticket or request a report. That’s not scalable.
This creates bottlenecks and limits the value of your data. Modern platforms should support self-service and empower users across sales, operations, and customer service to access the information they need.
Even technically sound platforms struggle if the data is messy. And in distribution, we often see:
If your platform makes it harder for you to keep your data clean and standardized, it’s not doing what you need it to do.
A medical distributor we worked with funneled daily sales from multiple branches into their old data warehouse, which lacked any built-in data cleaning tools that modern platforms provide. It mixed up date formats, duplicated customer IDs, and was inconsistent with units of measure. This forced us to perform on-the-fly data cleanup for every reporting project and application. Solving this problem at its root – with a modern data platform – saved many hours of work.
Older platforms often come with high licensing, storage, and support costs. Today’s technology can often deliver better performance at a fraction of the cost. We’ve seen distributors go from paying 10s of thousands a month to just thousands.
Don’t keep investing in legacy technology just to keep it running.
Your data platform needs to be ready for what’s coming and in some cases for what’s already here: AI-powered tools, real-time pricing recommendations, better customer analytics, and automation. But many older systems weren’t built to handle unstructured data or support scalable analytics.
A modern data platform gives you room to grow, experiment, and innovate.
Many distributors want to run sophisticated pricing or rebate programs but spend 80% of the project timeline cleaning data. That’s lost time and value.
If your team spends weeks wrangling data before a project even starts, the platform isn’t doing enough. Initiatives shouldn’t stall because no one can get clean, usable data in one place.
A modern data platform should reduce friction so that data is ready, accessible, and structured to support new use cases when they come up.
If your data platform is hindering access, slowing down projects, or making your teams work harder than they should, it’s time to re-evaluate.
At ProfitOptics, we help distributors modernize their data foundation so their systems enable growth instead of standing in the way. Reach out today.
