As we wrap up and head out for Thanksgiving this week, we are feeling grateful for our incredible staff and amazing customers for making this year's MITS Exchange the biggest and best yet!

Now that MITS Discover 11 and MITS Report 4 are available, with more and more customers upgrading each week, we’ve put together a series of training webinars to help users put these new releases to work.

Earlier this week I hosted a webinar with our new VP of Sales, Brian Friedle, on using analytics to do a better job of planning and budgeting. What I really liked about the content Brian put together is that it is very much grounded in the realities of those of you that are running, or working in, a distribution business. Prior to joining MITS, Brian worked in distribution for 24 years, 13 of which he spent as the president of an electrical distributor.

Here are 3 of the many tips he gave during the webinar:

When it comes to maximizing the impact of reporting and analytics on your distribution operation, self-service is the name of the game. That is why over 220 companies using Infor Distribution solutions rely on MITS Distributor Analytics to help their employees identify new business insights and automate the exchange of actionable information.

How do you know if your budget and projections for 2018 are reasonable and achievable? Many projections are just a wish list of what you hope will happen. It’s no surprise that actual performance rarely mirrors the projections.

If you are planning for growth, simply saying you’ll sell more or spend less isn’t enough. Can you pinpoint new sales opportunities, areas for margin or process improvement, behaviors that can be changed to inspire more sales from existing customers?