Client PortalManaged IT for wholesale distribution
IT Support for Wholesale Distributors in Melbourne
Distribution is a chain, and a chain has the useful property of failing in exactly one place at a time. An order arrives, it is entered, it is picked, it is despatched, it is invoiced. Every one of those steps is now a system, and the business moves at the speed of the slowest one.
Which is why a distributor feels an IT problem differently from an office business. Nothing goes wrong quietly. Everything stacks up behind it.
Want the number first? Our pricing is published: AgileCORE from $85 and AgileCOMPLETE from $130 per user per month ex GST, plus the AgileSECURE add-on at $44. Estimate your monthly figure in two minutes, or book a conversation.
Where the chain breaks
Four links, and a different failure behind each one
When a distributor tells us the systems are unreliable, the useful question is not which system, it is which link. The answer is nearly always one of these four, and each has a different fix.
The order arrives
By email, by portal, by EDI, and for a lot of distributors still by phone. Mail is the single most common point of failure and the single most common point of fraud, because an order channel that is also a conversation is an easy thing to impersonate. Mail that is unavailable for two hours is a sales outage, which is not how most businesses think of it.
It is entered and priced
The ERP is not a system the business uses, it is the system the business is. When it is slow, every order is slow. When its pricing or stock data is wrong, the error is not caught until it reaches a customer, which makes data integrity an operational concern rather than an administrative one.
It is picked
Scanners, labels and coverage through racking. These are the least glamorous assets in the business and the ones that stop work most directly. A scanner that drops connection in one aisle is not a device fault, it is a design fault, and it gets solved by surveying the building rather than by replacing the scanner.
It despatches and invoices
Carrier systems, customer portals, the accounting package, and the integrations between them that somebody set up once and nobody owns now. Integrations fail silently, which means the first sign is usually a customer asking where something is. They need monitoring like anything else the business depends on.
The attack aimed at your trading relationships
A distributor's mailbox is worth more to an attacker than its data
You send and receive invoices all day, to and from businesses that expect your invoices. Someone who gets into a mailbox does not need to steal anything. They watch, wait for a real invoice, and send a near-identical one with different bank details, in the right thread, in the right tone, at the right time. Your customer pays it, and the argument about who carries the loss starts from there.
The controls that stop it are ordinary and they are not optional at your transaction volume: multi-factor authentication on every account, monitoring for mailbox rules and forwarding that nobody set deliberately, alerting on unusual sign-ins, and a standing rule that a change to bank details is verified by phone on a number you already had. AgileSECURE delivers that aligned to the SMB1001 maturity framework.
Scope
What we take responsibility for
Agreed in writing on day one in a Responsibility and Accountability Matrix, link by link.
The platform the ERP runs on
Server or cloud, monitored around the clock, backed up with restores tested by performing one, sized for the way your business actually loads it, and the vendor relationship handled so your operations manager is not the escalation path.
The warehouse as a technical space
Coverage surveyed and designed for racking and height, scanners and label printers managed as operational equipment rather than accessories, and the network built so a pick does not depend on standing in the right aisle.
Mail, identity and trading security
Microsoft 365 managed properly, multi-factor authentication everywhere, monitoring for the mailbox changes that precede invoice fraud, and access that ends when a person or a contract does.
Published pricing
AgileMANAGED: structured IT from $85 per user / month
We publish our pricing because a business that lives on margin deserves to know the number before the first meeting, not after the third.
AgileCORE
Remote support, monitoring, security baselines and Microsoft 365 management. Suits a distributor whose core systems are already hosted and in good order.
View AgileCORE →AgileCOMPLETE
Everything in CORE, plus onsite support, managed servers with 24/7 monitoring, and quarterly business reviews. The usual fit where a warehouse and an ERP are involved.
View AgileCOMPLETE →Where we work
Based in Mornington, working the bayside industrial belt
Agile IT Solutions has been based in Mornington since 2007. A number of the distributors we look after sit in the industrial pocket around Braeside, which is a comfortable drive when a problem needs someone in the building rather than on the phone. Most issues are resolved remotely, and onsite support across our service area is included with AgileCOMPLETE.
If you would rather see how we work before talking about your own operation, our case studies set out what we actually did and what changed.
Questions
IT questions from distributors
Our ERP is slow at the busiest time of day. Is that a hardware problem?
Sometimes, and often not. The common causes are a database that has never been maintained, a server sized for the business five years ago, a link that is saturated at the hours everyone is working, or a report somebody scheduled to run at 10am. We measure it before recommending anything, because buying a bigger server is the expensive way of not finding out. If it does turn out to be the hardware, you get a replacement plan with dates rather than an invoice.
Do you support our ERP or warehouse management system?
We do not write it and we are not its consultant. We take responsibility for everything underneath it: the platform, the database, the backups, the devices and the network, plus the vendor relationship when something needs escalating. When the fault is in the application, we deal with that vendor rather than handing you back a ticket number.
Our integrations break and we only find out from customers. Can that be fixed?
Yes, and it is one of the more common gaps we find. Integrations between a webstore, an ERP, a carrier and an accounting package tend to be set up once by whoever was available and then owned by nobody. They can be monitored like any other dependency, so a failed sync raises an alert rather than a phone call. Where the integration itself is fragile, we will say so and tell you what it would take to make it less so.
Scanners keep dropping out in certain aisles. Is that the scanners?
Almost never. Racking full of stock is one of the hardest environments for wi-fi, and coverage changes as the stock profile changes, which is why it works in January and not in June. It gets fixed by surveying the building as it is currently loaded and designing coverage for it, including the aisles people have quietly stopped relying on. Replacing scanners first is the usual approach and the usual waste.
Our customers are starting to send us security questionnaires. Why?
Because you are in their supply chain, and larger businesses now assess that. The questions are predictable: multi-factor authentication, patching, backups, who has access and what happens if you are compromised. We give you factual answers because we hold the evidence, and where a control is missing we say so and put a date against it. Our compliance obligations page sets out what applies to Victorian businesses.
How do we get started?
A discovery conversation, and for a distributor that usually means walking the warehouse as well as looking at the office. We work out what you run on today, how it is managed and where the gaps are, then set out what a structured managed service would look like. No obligation and no quote pushed at you in the first meeting.