Automation for wholesale and distribution
Limited time · 40% off an audit. Terms
Distribution runs on documents. Quotes as PDFs, orders as emailed spreadsheets, confirmations as replies nobody files — and somebody types all of it into the ERP. A short, fixed-price audit of that work, then a build that handles the typing.
The work is moving data between documents
A distributor's day is mostly transcription: read the request, find the products and prices, build a quote, type it into a system. A hundred times a week, every customer in a different format.
The ERP holds the data, but it cannot read an email, interpret a part number written three ways, or know this customer always gets the old pricing. That lives with two or three people.
The audit writes that down first. Automating a pricing rule nobody articulated is how you quote your largest account wrong.
Where distribution hours usually go
The ones that come up most often. Yours will differ in the details.
Quotes and RFQs
PDFs, spreadsheets and emails, each needing products matched and pricing applied. Often the slowest step to revenue.
Pricing rules nobody wrote down
Tiered pricing, volume breaks and exceptions agreed on a call in 2021 — held by one person who cannot take a vacation.
Purchase order processing
POs typed into the ERP by hand, with a transcription error rate nobody measures but everyone has felt.
Supplier confirmations and shortages
Chasing ship dates by email and catching the short-shipped line before the customer does.
Inventory across locations
What the warehouse says against what the system says, then deciding which to trust.
Order status inquiries
Customers emailing to ask where something is, answered by someone opening three screens to find out.
If one person is the only route to a correct quote, that is a risk, not a process.
The audit prices each opportunity in your own numbers, with a downside case beside it. A mis-keyed PO costs a return, a credit note and a difficult call.
When a workflow is not ready — scattered data, a process that changes every time — the report says so plainly instead of selling you a build that will break.
Built around the ERP, not instead of it
No new platform, no migration, no rebuild.
Built against the systems you have — NetSuite, SAP Business One, Acumatica, Epicor, QuickBooks, EDI feeds. Everything runs in accounts you own.
Nobody is migrating your ERP. Work sits around it, reading and writing through whatever interface it exposes.
On anything a customer sees
Anything a customer sees keeps a human in the loop. Pricing and commitments stay under human approval.
Where our experience does and does not apply
Straight answer: we have run multichannel ecommerce brands, not a distribution business. Supplier work, inventory reconciliation and order exceptions overlap closely. Contract pricing and EDI do not, and we will not pretend otherwise.
What transfers is the method. Two decades of enterprise architecture for major US banks and insurers was this problem at larger scale: inconsistent formats, rules in people's heads, systems that disagree.
We can show you what we built for our own brands, and you can judge the fit.
Start small if you prefer
A $999 Workflow Review takes one workflow — quoting or PO processing — and tells you what it costs and whether it is worth automating. Credited in full against an audit.
Limited time · 40% off an audit. Terms