How to Automate Encompass Technologies

The distributor is the only tier that touches every case

Encompass Technologies makes Encompass Distribution Cloud, the ERP a beverage distributor runs its whole operation on. In the United States a producer cannot sell beer, wine or spirits straight to the bar, so every case and keg passes through a distributor's warehouse and onto a distributor's truck.

That makes the distributor the one company in the chain that has physically handled the product, and Encompass holds what that involves. Sales carries the accounts and the pricing. Warehouse Management directs the pick. Logistics builds the routes, and Delivery puts the run in a driver's hand on a phone. Finance closes the books, and Reporting builds the dashboards a sales manager reads on Monday.

Nobody in it is sitting still. A rep works a list of accounts a day. A driver has a delivery window at every stop, and a dispatcher is re-cutting the day at six because two loads changed overnight.

A driver's day ends at four and the office day does not

The trucks come back and a second shift starts at a desk.

Somebody works yesterday's deliveries looking for drops with no signed proof of delivery against them, because an unsigned drop is a short-pay waiting to happen. Somebody else has the credit hold list, opening each account's balance and aging to decide who can be released before the next load builds. The day's order exceptions, the shorts, the substitutions and the out-of-stocks, get read line by line.

Then the work that is not in Encompass at all. An inbound load is somewhere on a carrier's tracking page. A new bar three streets from an existing route got its licence last month and nobody has called on it. The account that stopped ordering in March has a menu online listing somebody else's taps. Each of those means signing into another company's site and writing down what it says.

Encompass Technologies

New licences before the first call On-premise licences newly issued near an existing route, listed as prospects, and lapsed ones flagged before another load goes out to them.

Inbound loads with a real ETA Supplier loads tracked on the carrier's own site, so a delay becomes a call to the account today rather than a short delivery on Thursday.

The office list, already sorted Missing proofs of delivery, credit holds, backorders and yesterday's order exceptions gathered into one worklist before the trucks load.

Distribution Cloud already runs the truck, the pick and the ledger

A distributor should use everything Encompass already offers before buying anything else, and that is a long list.

Mobile Delivery is direct store delivery on iOS and Android, carrying the truck manifest, directions and signature capture, so a drop and its paperwork finish at the stop rather than back at the depot. Warehouse Management directs the pick and supports voice picking for the people whose hands are full. Retail Ordering, which stores know as dsdlink, lets a retailer place its own order without a rep keying it, and Retail Payments, paylink, collects on the route. Over the top sits EncompassIQ: OrderIQ for ordering, ApIQ for predictive analytics, ReportingIQ for reports.

What all of it shares is the ground it stands on: your orders, inventory, routes and ledger, already inside Encompass or arriving from a trading partner who agreed to send them. Within those walls the picture is complete.

It is also only your side of the transaction. The account's side belongs to the account, the licence record to a state agency, the load in transit to a carrier. None will build a distributor an integration, and all of them render perfectly well in a browser.

A new liquor licence is a new account before anyone calls

Give the office something that can open those sites every night, and a layer of guesswork turns into a list.

In most states the liquor licence record is public. A new on-premise licence a few streets from an existing stop is a prospect before any rep hears of it, and the lookup runs the other way too, because a lapsed licence is an account to stop shipping to. Inbound loads tracked on the carrier's own site, so a delay becomes a call to the account today rather than a short delivery on Thursday. An account's menu page read once a month, which is where a rep finds out the draught line they installed is pouring somebody else's brand.

Then the ordinary comparisons nobody has time for. What a chain retailer is charging for your brands on its own shelf pages, next to the price you set. Whether a promotion a supplier funded actually appears in the store's app.

The boundary is the one every distributor draws around a new hire. Gathering, comparing and listing can run unattended. Emailing a price change, releasing a credit hold or committing an order is prepared and left for a person, because each has money or a licence attached.

Adding accounts should not mean adding tabs

A distributor that doubles its account list doubles the checking, and the checking is the part nobody wants to hire for.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Encompass the way your office does, opens the state licence lookup, the carrier's tracking page or the retailer's site beside it, and leaves one list with the account numbers already attached.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and a workflow can be locked to a named list of domains. You can watch a run and stop it. Anything that emails a customer, moves a balance or commits an order is drafted and waits for a person.

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