With every new product there is a fresh opportunity to reduce costs and improve the operation. Few distributors take advantage of this and bring in lines that effectively cripple their facilities and burn out the employees.
For this reason new products and lines should be evaluated against operational criteria as well as the discounting and deals offered.
The ordering process. Anyone who has ever ordered online knows the frustrations of a poorly designed ordering system. If it takes five minutes to "fill a cart" from one vendor and 65 minutes to place a similar order with a competitor, the expense of the time and aggravation should be factored into business decisions. Asking your purchasing personnel to track this can influence which vendors are "preferred" and which should be dropped.
Inefficient or paper-based ordering systems can also radically diminish profitability. When orders require hours of work and take days to be entered at the vendor level "safety stock" inventory will increase. This artificially inflates inventory levels and ties up capital. With low interest rates this has minimal effect but when the cost of capital increases the leverage will work against profitability and space requirements. Try before you buy. Try the ordering system, try the vendor voice mail, and phone ordering system and factor this into the negotiations.
Receiving the merchandise. Damages, vendor shipping errors and other problems in an initial order could be "bad luck" or may be indicative of the vendor's overall quality. Looking further one might find palletized goods that arrive on an incompatible pallet (damaged, wrong size or impossible to handle with current equipment). Similarly, mixed cases without external indications of the nature of the contents will result in lost merchandise and miscounts that must be reconciled with the receiving documents. Poor packaging that fails to protect the contents causes claims that must be filed by the receiver. All this takes time and effort.
Track and communicate problems and resolutions. Establish procedures for expediting the information flow. While detailed numbers are always best, anecdotal gripes are still valid indications of how your personnel have interacted with the vendor and therefore should also be given due consideration. It is far better to deal with reliable suppliers, rather than the lowest price source.
Stocking the warehouse. Less than pallet load orders may arrive totally randomized on pallets or in mixed cases. Unfortunately, your staff must sort all this out before the merchandise can be stocked. This often entails considerable backtracking and double handling, with a consequent increase in mis-stocking. These problems impact the picking output and often this cost of stocking is hidden as extra time and labor by others.