FeedLink - Dealer Network & Feed Distribution Management
What started as a private ordering app for a buddy’s new venture, turned into a multi-facetted networking platform connected to a robust ordering, payments, and inventory management software.
Product Views
Problem Statement:
Solution Statement:
Product Description:
What I would do differently:
This project is still in operations and a closed testing network. As the build has progressed, items like the POS system have been highlighted and added. Additional modules are being highlighted and developed.
For small regional animal feed manufacturers and their dealers, business is done much the same way that other small businesses operate, using pen/paper, emails, and spreadsheets. Expanding operations and territories is time consuming and takes considerable energy and process momentum. Manual business processes just don’t work at the speed of business.
FeedLink is a software platform that lets animal feed manufacturers directly manage their distributors and dealers within their network. The software provides tools to incorporate new dealers and distributors into an existing network to seamlessly facilitate new orders, payments, and delivery updates.
The primary value proposition of FeedLink is that the solution can be implemented within any organization that owns the distribution and dealer network. The governing organization can incorporate all their distributors and their assigned dealers into one seamless supply chain. Once the networks have been created, dealers can submit bulk feed orders to their assigned distributors. Once approved, the platform facilitates payments using Stripe. Each order has process and delivery updates which incorporates inventory updates for each dealer. These ordering features create an efficient and transparent workflow that eliminates manual processes in the supply chain process.
Product Pivots:
The basic features of this solution are industry standards in many ordering systems in the industry. What made this software a little different was the need for each distributor to host their own products while being able to adapt the pricing and transportation costs for each region and dealer. Most animal feed manufacturers sell at the same price regardless of geographic region. But on the distributor level, there was a need to create a system that would allow them to input different pricing dependent on their geographic economics.
Looking at the system users from end-to-end, one gap that was discovered was that the end retailer needed a way to sell direct to consumer. The dealer/retailer could use FeedLink to buy bulk feed from various distributors/manufacturers, but selling to a consumer required single bag functionality. To solve this, we created a Point-Of-Sale system that could host all their other items as well as the feed items they ordered through the FeedLink network.