Distribution businesses tend to run on one system and eleven spreadsheets. Stock levels live in one place, customer pricing in another, purchasing in someone's inbox, and the true margin on an order is knowable only after the fact — by which point it's already been quoted. Growth makes this worse, not better.
We help you work out what should actually run the business, implement it, and build the pieces that genuinely need building.
Where we help
ERP review and selection
Independent assessment of what fits distribution properly — multi-warehouse, backorders, and customer-specific pricing included.
Implementation and migration
Configuration, data migration, and integration run by people who account for the messy history in your stock data.
3PL and fulfilment integration
Orders, consignments, and stock positions moving between your ERP and your logistics provider without anyone re-keying a CSV.
Customer ordering automation
Your customers' orders arriving in the ERP the way they were sent — EDI, portal, or file — instead of through someone's inbox.
B2B pricing and ordering
Customer terms, price tiers, and ordering that reflect the deals you've actually done, rather than a simplified model of them.
Custom APIs and middleware
Where your process is the advantage and no platform reaches it, we build — and integrate it to what you already run.
Why distributors come to us
- The business runs on spreadsheets that only one or two people fully understand
- Stock accuracy is poor enough that sales check the shelf before promising a date
- Customer-specific pricing is applied manually, so margin leaks quietly
- Orders go to the 3PL by email or spreadsheet, and the errors surface after despatch
- The ERP was implemented for a smaller, simpler version of the business
- Purchasing, inventory, and sales each have their own version of the truth
The spreadsheets aren't the problem — they're the symptom. They exist because they do something the real system can't, and replacing the system without understanding what they do is how the second implementation fails the same way as the first.
Buy, extend, or build
Most distributors should buy. Distribution is a well-served category, and a good platform configured properly beats a custom build on cost and risk. The value is in choosing correctly and implementing against your real process — that's Software Review & Implementation.
But the platform never reaches the edges. Your 3PL has its own way of receiving consignments; your largest customer sends orders in a format nobody else uses. That's where the building actually happens — not a replacement for the ERP, a layer around it.
We ran the selection independently and sourced the ERP that fitted the business — Cin7 — then built what the platform couldn't reach: custom APIs and middleware integrating their third-party warehouse and logistics provider for fulfilment, and automating customer ordering into the ERP.
Forty per cent of the spreadsheets the business ran on were retired into that single system. Orders now reach the 3PL through an API rather than an inbox, and are processed the same day.
Outcome Retired 40% of the spreadsheets into a single ERP, and moved the 3PL to same-day order processing via API.
This is the pattern most distribution engagements follow. The platform is a decision; the integrations are the work.
One disclosure, while we're naming things. Our sister brand MyWebTeam has since partnered with Cin7 to implement it. We selected Cin7 for this client before that partnership existed — the recommendation came first and the partnership followed it, not the other way round. You'd rather hear that from us than find it later, and if a platform we're affiliated with ever turns up in your shortlist, we'll say so at the time.
How we work
Review
We map how ordering, stock, purchasing, and pricing actually work — spreadsheets included, since they hold the real rules.
Recommend
An independent, written recommendation: what fits, what it costs, and what it will genuinely take to implement.
Implement and support
We run the implementation, build the integrations around it, and stay on afterwards.
No. We don't resell ERP licences and we carry no vendor quota, so the recommendation is whatever the assessment supports — including "keep what you have" or "none of these fit." You're paying us for the assessment, which is the only way it's worth anything.
Where the group does hold a platform partnership, we disclose it rather than let you discover it — see the note under the engagement above.
Often not. A surprising amount of "the ERP doesn't fit" turns out to be a configuration decision made years ago, or a missing integration that pushed work into spreadsheets. We'd rather find that than sell you a migration. When replacement genuinely is the answer, we'll say so and show the reasoning.
Yes — that's a large part of what we do here. Orders, consignments, and stock positions moving between your ERP and your logistics provider, and customer orders arriving in the format they were sent rather than through someone's inbox. See the engagement above.
Weeks, not months. The review moves quickly because the answers are in how the business already runs — the spreadsheets tell us more about your requirements than a specification will. Implementation timelines depend on the platform and your data, and we'd rather scope that honestly after the review than guess at it now.
Work out what should run the business
Bring us the spreadsheets. They'll tell us more about your requirements than a specification will.