How an industrial distributor went from 100 to 250+ orders a day with the same team

The desk at 8am

Picture the order desk: five people, headsets on, three screens each. Orders arriving as email PDFs, portal entries, spreadsheets, and phone calls. Every single one typed by hand into the system. On a good day the team cleared about 100 orders. On a bad day, the queue rolled into tomorrow and ship dates slipped.

The worse problem was invisible from the desk: with 200+ suppliers, each with its own portal, its own stock format, and its own quirks, confirming that an order could actually be fulfilled meant tabbing through vendor sites one at a time. Stockouts and payment mismatches surfaced at end-of-day reconciliation, sometimes days later, after the customer had already been promised a date.

What we didn't do

We didn't replace their ERP, and we didn't fire anyone. Both matter. Rip-and-replace projects are where distributor IT budgets go to die, and the five people on that desk knew things about suppliers and customers no system could replace. The goal was to take the typing away from them, not the judgment.

What we built, in plain terms

Over 16 weeks we shipped five connected systems on one platform:

• Order intake that reads incoming orders and enters them automatically, with real-time sync to the point-of-sale system.
• Supplier coordination that pulls live pricing and stock from 200+ vendor portals, so availability is checked in seconds instead of by tabbing.
• Failure recovery that catches stockouts and payment failures the moment they happen and reroutes the order to the next-best supplier by price, lead time, and fulfillment history, before the customer ever knows.
• Customer communication that fires at every milestone: confirmed, dispatched, delayed, delivered.
• Payment reconciliation that matches payments to bank entries daily, so finance reviews exceptions instead of rebuilding spreadsheets.

The build ran in weekly demos, went into shadow mode alongside the manual process at week eight, and cut over in stages: 25% of orders, then 50%, then all of them.

What changed

Ninety days after launch: 250+ orders a day through the same desk, up from roughly 100. About 1,500 failed orders a month now recover automatically through rerouting instead of leaking revenue. The five-person team wasn't laid off; they moved to exception handling and higher-value work, which is where humans actually beat software. Failure detection went from end-of-day (or end-of-week) to seconds.

The full technical write-up, including the architecture and the week-by-week build plan, is in the case study.

What this means for your desk

The pattern transfers to most distribution businesses we look at: the bottleneck is rarely the ERP, it's the human glue around it. If your team is the glue, the question worth 30 minutes is which workflow to unglue first. We'll map it with you and give you a straight answer on whether it's worth building.