You want every order picked, packed and gone before the courier sweep. Stock numbers people trust. The customer portal up. The EDI not silently failing at 4am. And the cyber answers ready when your biggest customer asks for them in the next supplier review. That's the job we take on.
Inology IT supports wholesale and 3PL distribution operations across Greater Manchester with managed IT built for the warehouse floor, not just the office. We support the stack distribution actually runs — Sage 200, NetSuite, Mintsoft, Linnworks, Brightpearl, Cin7 — plus the WMS layer and courier integrations (DPD, ParcelForce, UPS, DHL, GFS, Whistl). We map your floor on day one, harden EDI and B2B portal integrations, and prepare the cyber answers your tier-1 customers and supplier reviews actually ask for.
Most MSPs have never set up a Zebra ring scanner, never debugged a Mintsoft-to-courier API, never stood with a picker for an hour to see why the WMS lags at 11am. We come on site, we walk the floor, we map every scanner, every printer, every Wi-Fi black spot before we say we'll support it.
The most expensive outages in distribution are the silent ones — courier APIs dropping at 2am, EDI feeds rejected by a tier-1 retailer, B2B portal data going stale. We monitor the integration endpoints and raise a P1 alert the moment they fail, not when a customer rings the next afternoon.
Metal racking, dock doors, forklift interference and consumer-grade access points conspire to wreck a warehouse network. Dropped scans are real labour cost — pickers re-scanning, packers waiting, dispatch slipping. We do a proper survey with heatmap, then specify kit sized for your space.
Tier-1 retailer panels and large-customer onboarding now ask 40–60 cyber questions, often with 24-hour turnaround. Most distribution businesses guess, and lose contracts on the answers. We keep the evidence pack live; Cyber Essentials Plus is increasingly the floor.
Distribution runs on margin and minutes. We've supported wholesalers and 3PLs across Tameside, Trafford and the wider M60 logistics belt — we know what a missed courier sweep costs, what an EDI failure on a Friday afternoon looks like, and why a half-second scanner lag at peak times turns into real labour cost by year end.
We work with the stack distribution actually uses — Sage 200, NetSuite, Mintsoft, Linnworks, Brightpearl, Cin7, plus the WMS layer (Indigo, Mintsoft WMS, custom Sage add-ons) and the carrier integrations. We're not auditors and we don't pretend to be — but we know which IT-side evidence each supplier review expects, and we keep it ready.
A 30-minute call, on the phone or video. What you sell, who you sell to, the WMS, the ERP, the courier mix, the seasonal peak. We listen first.
We come on site. We watch a peak hour. We map the Wi-Fi, the scanners, the printers, the integrations, the leaver process, the cyber-pack readiness. You get a written read with what's solid, what's risky, and what we'd do first.
Pickers and packers stop chasing IT. Operations gets data they can trust. The MD has the cyber answers ready before the next supplier review. One number to ring, somebody who's walked your floor.
Helpdesk, device care, monthly reporting, integration monitoring. The baseline that everything else sits on.
On-site survey, heatmap, AP design and install. Built for racking, dock doors and forklift interference.
Tenant configured properly. SharePoint with customer-folder taxonomy. Sensitivity labels for commercial data.
Certification path with fixed-fee remediation. The floor for tier-1 retailer supplier panels and large-customer reviews.
We're not auditors and we don't pretend to be — but we know which IT-side evidence each of these reviews expects, and we keep it ready.
Inherited a warehouse with 11 dead Wi-Fi zones and a Mintsoft tenant nobody had touched in three years. Survey, AP refit, EDI monitoring deployed. Black Friday week shipped without a single P1.
Case study write-up — coming soon.
We support the IT layer your WMS runs on — network, database, scanner integrations, label printer drivers, courier APIs. Mintsoft, Indigo and Sage 200 add-ons we know best. We're not the WMS vendor's first-line support, but we know enough to triage cleanly and stop a vendor escalation lasting three days when it should have lasted three hours.
Yes — properly. We do an on-site Wi-Fi survey with a heatmap, identify dead zones and interference, then specify and install access points sized for the racking, the dock doors and the metal-shelved aisles that wreck consumer-grade kit. We use Ubiquiti, Cisco Meraki or Aruba depending on scale. Dropped scans cost real money; we'll show you the survey report before any kit is bought.
Most distribution outages we see are silent EDI or carrier-API failures — nobody notices for hours. We add monitoring on the integration endpoints so a failure raises a P1 alert immediately, not when a customer rings. We work with the common stacks: Mintsoft to DPD/ParcelForce/UPS/DHL/GFS/Whistl, Sage 200 to large-retailer EDI VANs, NetSuite to Shopify and Amazon. We document the dependency chain so when something breaks we know where to look first.
We agree elevated cover for your peak — typically 6 weeks for retail-facing distribution running into Black Friday and Christmas, or your sector-specific seasonal peak. Named senior engineer on standby, daily check-in, change windows frozen unless emergency, response SLAs tightened. We won't onboard a new client into the four weeks before a known peak — too much risk for both sides.
We complete supplier-portal questionnaires, due-diligence packs and tier-1 retailer security packs as part of managed service. We maintain a live evidence pack so when a customer wants a 60-question security questionnaire back in 24 hours, we can. Cyber Essentials Plus is increasingly the floor for supplier panels — we have a standard certification path.
Zebra, Honeywell and Datalogic scanners (handheld, ring, wearable); Zebra, Brother and Toshiba label printers; rugged Windows handhelds; mobile-mounted forklift terminals. We hold standard configurations for clients who roll out new sites or refresh kit, and we know which print drivers are stable across Windows updates and which aren't.
Days 1–14: floor walk on a peak hour, Wi-Fi survey, IT and security read, ticket triage, immediate stability fixes. Days 14–45: baseline rolled out (MFA, EDR, monitoring on EDI and courier endpoints), restore drill on ERP and WMS databases, scanner standard config rolled out. Days 45–90: Cyber Essentials path if needed, supplier-pack assembled, peak-season prep. We schedule major changes around your weekly cut-off — never on dispatch days.
On the Complete tier (£95/user) you have 24/7 SOC for security incidents. For full IT-side OOH cover — courier API down, label printer pool offline, EDI silently failing into the small hours — we add the OOH bolt-on (£250/month + £500 per 5-hour block used). Most distribution clients add it after their first 4am incident.
Wholesalers and 3PLs we support across Tameside, Trafford, Manchester, Stockport and Oldham. If your warehouse is outside Greater Manchester but your office is inside, we'll likely still be a fit — see our IT support coverage across Greater Manchester.
Orders out the door before the sweep, every day. Stock numbers people trust. Cyber answers ready for the next supplier review without scrambling. One number for IT, picked up by somebody who's walked your floor.
Talk to Brett or Simon. 30 minutes, on the phone or video. No deck, no decision pressure — we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.