Case study
Every follow-up now sits on one daily list.
A distributor of commercial equipment that holds no stock. It buys from wholesale distributors, and every order ships straight from the distributor to the customer's site.
- Who
- A B2B equipment distributor
- Used
- On desktop, phone and tablet
- Built
- Custom app
The problem
- Orders are placed months before delivery, and big jobs ship in stages: one order, several shipments, different quantities on different dates.
- Someone had to check stock about a month before each delivery. That check lived in people's heads and email threads, and dates slipped past.
- Purchase orders sometimes sat unacknowledged for weeks with nobody noticing.
- Shipping details came to the company only. Staff retyped them into an email to the customer, or the customer never heard.
- Prices were retyped into every quote from a spreadsheet, so sister sites of one buyer could be quoted different prices.
- Quotes and payments were chased from memory.
- Nothing showed, per product, how many were ordered, on the purchase order, shipped and invoiced. One unit out could cost a day.
What we noticed
The call beat the written brief.
The brief led with pricing agreements that expire. On the call, the owner kept coming back to delivery dates getting lost. So we built for that: a list of who to contact about which order today, not a chart of how many orders are late.
Usable first.
We kept the accounting system they already had and shipped the follow-up list on its own. Then it grew in small releases, and the team used each one as it landed.
Nothing clears itself.
A follow-up stays open until a person records the answer, so the board never shows green when it isn't.
Shipping notices go out one at a time.
There is no "send all" button. One misread column in a bulk send would become a batch of wrong promises to customers.
We left out the stock ledger.
The business holds no stock, so we did not build a warehouse system for it.
What we built
-
The daily list
- A dashboard that opens on today's work, most urgent first.
- Follow-ups made from the dates on each order: quote and payment chases, stock checks before delivery, release chases, and one for each staged shipment.
- An "at risk" list of orders that may miss the customer's date.
-
Counts, devices and books
- A count check per product: ordered, on purchase order, shipped and invoiced side by side, with any mismatch said in a plain sentence.
- Works on phone and tablet, with notifications.
- Their existing accounting system stays as the books.
-
Quotes and orders
- Quotes from the current price list, with a warning when the same buyer was recently quoted a different price.
- Quotes below a set floor wait for the owner's yes.
- A link on every quote to accept, decline or ask for changes. Acceptance becomes the order confirmation.
- Purchase orders raised from the accepted quote, split delivery schedules included, with no retyping.
-
Shipping
- A daily upload of the distributor's open-orders file that shows what changed since yesterday before anything is saved.
- Distributor shipping emails read automatically and turned into shipment records.
- Customer shipping notices drafted from them, sent one at a time after a person reads each one.
- Damage claims tracked with the deadline counting down.
How a day works now
Open the dashboard. It shows what is overdue and what is due today.
Upload the daily file. Anything that moved rises to the top.
Work the list. Contact the distributor or customer, log what they said, and the item clears.
Send shipping notices. Review each one drafted from a distributor email and send it.
Build quotes. Prices come from the price list, and the customer answers from a link.
Where it stands
- In daily use by the owner and staff.
- The owner chose to train a new hire on it rather than on the old system.
- Shipping emails now become shipment records with no typing.
What do you need built?
Start a project- Emailmatthew@klembarasolutions.com
- Phone(469) 999-7145