Half of the respondents to a recent survey said they failed to deliver some percentage of customer orders on time last year. The survey, conducted by business software provider Exact, found that top five reasons for not meeting delivery expectations were:
- Receipt of raw materials past due (39%)
- Inaccurate estimation of time to complete order (25%)
- Dependency on subcontractors, e.g. let down by supplier (23%)
- Unexpected or seasonal influx of incoming orders (21%)
- Insufficient capacity (19%)
“We recently surveyed a similar group of small businesses, which also includes wholesale distributors, and in that research it was clear that there’s a reluctance to address these challenges with technology,” said Steve Leavitt, GM of U.S. Cloud Solutions for Exact.
In this survey, seven out of 10 small manufacturers and wholesalers think that enterprise resource planning (ERP) software (or ERP-like business software) is too costly and they don’t see how it would benefit their businesses.