Where does the margin actually go?
Ask a commercial director in wholesale where his margin goes and you will get three answers at once: suppliers passing on price increases, customers unwilling to move on price, and an internal process that responds too slowly to both. That third point is systematically underestimated. Purchase prices are updated in the ERP, but the quotes the sales team takes out are already behind. Contract prices with regular customers were negotiated on a cost basis that is three months old. By the time someone flags the difference, the damage is done. Not out of negligence, but because the data is not available quickly enough at the point where the decision is made.
Why does trade data always lag behind?
The pattern in wholesale is familiar: the ERP records transactions but is not a steering tool. Procurement works with confirmations by email or portal, which are entered manually. Sales sends quotes from a separate system or simply from Outlook. Between those three layers there is a structural delay. Supplier price lists arrive as PDF or Excel files, are reviewed by one person who also has twenty other things to do, and then disappear into a shared folder. The result: nobody has an up-to-date picture of actual purchase costs by product group, by supplier, by customer. Margin improvement does not start with better negotiating. It starts with better visibility.
What does geopolitical uncertainty do to your procurement process?
The Netherlands is an open economy and wholesalers feel this directly. Import tariffs, exchange rates, and shifting trade routes make purchase prices more volatile than they used to be. Credendo signals that Dutch companies are exposed to the consequences of global trade shifts, even when they do not export themselves, simply because their suppliers do. For a wholesaler, this means a price list that is three months old is no longer a reliable basis for a quote today. Yet in many companies, that is still exactly how it works. The frequency at which purchase data is updated and passed on to sales was not designed for a market that moves monthly. That gap needs to close, and closing it is a systems question, not a people question.
Faster data is not an IT project, it is an operational decision
The instinct is to frame this as a digitization project. That framing is exactly what slows it down. This is not about building a new system for the sake of building. It is about one concrete problem: at the moment a salesperson creates a quote or renews a contract price, they need to see the current purchase cost. Everything required to make that happen is the real work. That might mean automatically processing supplier price lists and linking them to your product master data. It might mean adding a margin view to your quote process before the quote goes out. It does not need to be large-scale. But it must genuinely run in the operation, not as a pilot sitting alongside existing ways of working.
When is a system change the right move?
Not every wholesaler benefits from a major system overhaul. If your ERP still functions and reliably records the core of your logistics and finances, it is often wiser to build targeted improvements on top of what is already there. Think of automatically processing incoming price lists, a layer that brings sales and purchase data together for margin reporting, or a quote workflow that checks whether the purchase price used is current. If the problems run deeper, if orders, inventory, and pricing are structurally out of sync and layering solutions is only making things more complex, then the moment may come when the system itself is the bottleneck. In that case, rebuilding is more sensible than continuing to stack layers on top. Making that distinction is the first conversation worth having.