Almadar A distributor with a head office near An Nakheel and warehouses on the edge of the city needs a platform that handles landed costs on bonded imports correctly, not just inventory counts that look tidy on a screen.
Supply Chain is typically deployed alongside D365 Finance, since every movement of goods has a financial consequence. Together they cover procure-to-pay and order-to-cash end to end, replacing the spreadsheet-and-email coordination that most Saudi mid-market distributors still run on.
Procurement and vendor management
Purchase requisitions flow through approval hierarchies matched to your delegation of authority, with vendor onboarding, qualification and performance tracking. Three-way matching between purchase order, receipt and invoice prevents payment for goods never delivered, which sounds obvious and is nonetheless one of the most common leakage points we find in businesses running manual processes.
Inventory, warehousing and landed cost
Inventory is configured for your actual physical structure: multiple sites, zones and bin locations, with barcode or RFID scanning for receipt, pick and putaway. For importers, landed cost functionality allocates customs duty, freight, insurance and clearing charges across received items so inventory is valued at true cost. Without this, gross margin by product is systematically wrong, usually in a direction that flatters the higher-volume lines.
Production planning
For manufacturers, Supply Chain covers bills of material, routes, work orders, capacity planning and shop floor execution, with actual material and labor costs captured against each production order. Master planning generates purchase and production suggestions from demand, which is where the platform starts driving decisions rather than merely recording them.
A common Saudi scenario
A Riyadh building materials importer holds stock across two warehouses and a bonded area at the port. Landed cost is currently estimated as a flat percentage, meaning heavy low-value items are under-costed and light high-value items over-costed. Supply Chain is implemented with actual landed cost allocation by weight and value. Product-level margin analysis changes materially, and two product lines the company believed were profitable turn out not to be.
Integration with planning and finance
Demand and supply data feed forecasting so that working capital plans reflect what operations actually intends to buy, and inventory valuation posts automatically to the ledger, removing the month-end reconciliation between an operational stock report and the finance system that consumes so much time in businesses running disconnected systems.
Warehouse execution and mobile operations
Advanced warehouse management adds directed putaway, wave picking and mobile device execution, which for a distributor running more than one warehouse is usually where the labour saving actually comes from. Configuration must reflect how your team physically works: aisle and bin naming that matches the signage on the racks, pick paths that follow the layout rather than the item code sequence. This ties into process design, because warehouse software imposed on an illogical physical layout produces frustration rather than efficiency.
Riyadh distributors more often prioritize multi-location transfer and replenishment across a branch network.