How to Automate DMSi Agility

Every load that leaves the yard started in Agility

DMSi Agility is the ERP that building materials and industrial distributors run on: lumber yards and pro dealers, millwork and door shops, hardwood suppliers, roofing and siding distributors, and the electrical, plumbing and HVAC wholesalers on the industrial side.

It is not one system among several. It is the counter, the yard, the buying and the ledger in one place. A contractor phones for forty squares of architectural shingle and a delivery on Thursday. That call becomes an order in Agility, which becomes a pick in the warehouse, a load on a truck, a delivery ticket, an invoice and a line in the general ledger, without ever leaving the software.

The people in it all day are not analysts. They are counter staff with a customer waiting, a buyer with sixty purchase orders to place, a dispatcher fitting eleven deliveries into eight trucks. Everything they do is on a clock somebody else is watching.

Half the buying day happens on somebody else's website

The work Agility does not cover is not clever work. It is checking.

A buyer opens the mill's dealer portal to see whether the special order shipped, then the second mill, then the third, because each publishes lead times only to people who log in. Somebody checks a carrier's site for the inbound flatbed that was due Tuesday. Somebody pulls this month's price sheet out of a vendor extranet and compares it line by line against the price file, because a two percent change on a fast-moving item is money and nobody announces it. Somebody logs into a manufacturer's rebate program to see where the branch sits against the next tier, with a quarter ending in three weeks.

None of it is hard. All of it is a login, a search box and a screen of numbers that has to be read and typed somewhere else. It gets done when there is time, which in this business means late.

DMSi Agility

The morning price check This morning's cost on each mill's dealer portal, set against your own price file, with only the items that moved on the list.

Special orders with real dates Availability and lead times read off each vendor's own site and written against the order, so the counter is not guessing on Thursday.

Rebate tiers before the quarter closes The distance to the next rebate threshold, with enough buying days left to close it, rather than after the numbers are final.

Suggested purchasing reads the branch, not the mill

Agility automates a great deal of what happens inside the four walls, and a distributor should exhaust that before buying anything else.

Suggested purchasing calculates reorder points from demand and history and proposes the purchase orders. Demand forecasting works ahead of the season. Automated branch transfers move stock between locations without anyone raising a request. Split purchase orders let you sell off an inbound load before it lands. Mobile warehouse tools and barcode tallying keep the yard count honest between physical inventories, and cycle counting handles the rest. The Digital OrderPad and the point of sale take the counter order, Agility Commerce Cloud puts a contractor's account online, and the Proof of Delivery app closes the loop on the truck. EDI and vendor interfaces carry orders and acknowledgements with the vendors who support them.

The pattern is that all of it runs on what Agility already holds, or on what a trading partner has agreed to send. Suggested purchasing is only as good as the demand history behind it, and it has no idea the mill went on allocation this morning. EDI covers the vendors big enough to have EDI. Everyone else publishes to a web portal and expects a human to go and read it.

The vendor's screen can become a line in Agility

What a buyer gathers by hand from vendor sites can arrive in Agility as a field instead.

This morning's mill price against the cost in your price file, so the item that moved is on a list before the buyer starts placing orders. Availability and lead time for every open special order, checked on each vendor's own site and written against the sales order, so the counter can tell a contractor the truth on Tuesday instead of guessing until Friday. Inbound freight tracked on the carrier's site, with anything that stopped moving flagged before a delivery gets promised on it.

Then the quieter ones. Where the branch stands against the next rebate tier with three weeks of the quarter left, which is the difference between hitting it and missing it by a truckload. Whether a customer's credit application came back. Whether the warranty registration a homeowner is waiting on actually went through on the manufacturer's site. Whether the yard down the road changed a posted price.

The rule is the one every distributor already applies to a new hire. Let it gather and let it compare. Do not let it commit. Placing a purchase order, releasing credit and quoting a builder are decisions with money attached.

The buyer's judgement was never the slow part

Knowing which vendor to lean on, and what a contractor's account is worth keeping, is the job. Opening six portals to find out what they say is not, and it is what fills the morning.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the mill's dealer portal, the carrier's tracking page or the rebate program, reads the screen the way a buyer would, and puts the answer where the branch can act on it.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment. You can watch a run and stop it, and anything with money on the end of it waits for a person.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.