Are you spending too much time managing your certifications?
Are you having to specify customers’ processing requirements in separate spreadsheets?
Do you know what lengths of steel you have in stock at a glance?
Can you easily keep track of the rapidly fluctuating buying prices of materials, and the margins you need to maintain?
We aim to make software that makes life easier for our customers.
You are constantly juggling multiple customer needs and expectations, from fluctuating pricing to variable lead times, storage issues to highly specialised processing finishes.
The steel stockholders and merchants we work with give us feedback that we build into the systems we design, ensuring we are producing the tools, measures and methods that people actually want.
From the clear, straightforward user dashboard to the intuitive usability throughout the system, we create powerful, simple software that helps you get the job done, better. We’ve been designing merchant software for 40 years, backed up by friendly, responsive service and a keen curiosity about the evolution of the market and industry as a whole.
As a cloud-based stock management and trading system, Merchanter offers the ultimate accessibility and flex to help you run your business in the most convenient way. So far, so generic, you may think.
So why do steel stockholders choose Merchanter over and above the other systems in the market?
While the wider global construction industry faces unprecedented challenges at present, the steel industry has its own unique issues to tackle, from sustainability to variable pricing of materials and quality control. Merchanter has many features built in which are designed specifically to help steel stockists and suppliers to meet those challenges head on.
Certification made simpler
Steel certification is incredibly complex, as you know. Merchanter makes it simple to keep track of the relevant paperwork, enabling you to digitally attach it to the relevant stock so your sourcing and trading is all audit-compliant.
Digital storage of certification saves enormous amounts of time and can eliminate errors and omissions. With more and more stringent standards coming into place, including UK-specific regulations as part of our exit from the EU, the process and auditing of certification in steel production is only likely to get worse, so having a simple system in place to manage it is essential.
Stock management that’s fit for purpose
Merchanter is industry-specific software. That means it lets you categorise and stock materials in whatever way you need to. You can hold product by weight, length and obviously type, and conversions between different metrics are really simple.
So however you want to buy, stock, process, range and sell your materials, Merchanter makes it easy and accurate.
Processing and finishing instructions made easy
Merchanter lets you specify processing and finishing instructions both as a Mill Order and, unusually, directly from a sales order.
So, you can complete a straightforward processing order specifying whatever finishes you require - saw cutting, drilling, shot blasting, painting, laser profiling – whatever you need, you can specify it easily and clearly. As you might expect.
Where Merchanter makes life even easier is that you can also specify the entire order lifecycle, including finishing and instructions for useful remainder stock, from within the sales order, keeping everything in one place and saving a huge amount of time.
For example, if you’re selling to a customer, you can specify exactly which stock to take the materials from, what finishes and processes are required, and what add-ons they need, very easily. But you can also give instructions to rebate leftover materials back into stock, meaning you always have a more accurate stockholding valuation to hand – so if you’ve used a longer beam length to supply a required shorter beam, you can return what’s left to stock to sell on in a different format later.
Accurate pricing and margin protection
Within the same order process, you can specify the margin you want so that the entire job will be priced up accurately, meaning you can always be confident that your prices really do cover the costs of the production, finishing and supply process, taking into account anything that goes back into stock afterward.
Merchanter also tracks the buying prices of materials and enables you to set margin protection limits in the system so you’re never selling below cost price, and you can easily track the trends and changes over time. Obviously the prices you decide to sell at are entirely up to you, but with comprehensive tracking and analytics, you are always in control and making decisions based on the correct, up to date information.
The advantages
Always know what you have in stock and where it is, in real time
Optimise stock value from processed products returned to stock
Maintain margin even on complex orders
Simplify instructions to keep everything in one place
Clarity and transparency over stock, processes and order management
Better customer service and communication made easier
Easy for someone else to pick up an order at any point for consistent service
Issues are flagged early through alerts to minimise risk
Save time and effort with no duplication of admin and easier tracking
So easy, you don’t even need us to demo it for you
If you’d like to try Merchanter for yourself to discover just how easy it is to use, without the sales pitch, just register your details and we’ll send you login details.
Comments