The request comes in as a PDF and goes out again as a quote. In between sits half a day of retyping.
In technical trade it’s about speed and knowing what you have in stock. The customer who gets a quote first often wins the order. At the same time a large part of the day goes into retyping: requests from PDF and email, the customer’s part numbers next to yours, supplier price lists that arrive as attachments. And at the back of the warehouse sits stock nobody asks for any more. That’s all boring work, and precisely for that reason well suited to automation.
A technical wholesaler with a trade counter, a warehouse with thousands of items and an inside sales team that prepares quotes from email requests.
Sound familiar?
- A request comes in as a PDF or a photo of a list; someone retypes the lines into the quoting system.
- The customer uses their own part numbers; matching them to your range is search work in one person’s head.
- The bestseller has just sold out and the customer orders it elsewhere. Nobody records that you missed that order.
- At the back of the warehouse sits a pallet that was there last year too. Writing it off feels like throwing money away.
- Supplier price lists come in as PDFs and only get into the system weeks later, by which time your margin is already off.
- The webshop says “in stock” while the last one has just gone over the counter.
- Standard questions to inside sales are about delivery time, price and whether something fits another item, every single day.
What usually runs here
That does not have to go. We build in between and around it.
Where the gains are
Turning requests into a quote automatically
A PDF, email or photo of a request list is read; the lines are matched to your items and set up as a draft quote.
the quote often goes out the same day instead of two days laterMatching customer part numbers
Customer and supplier numbers and descriptions are matched to your own range, even when the spelling differs. Doubtful cases are put to a person as a suggestion.
less searching and fewer wrongly delivered itemsOrder proposals and lost sales
The system forecasts demand per item from your own history and lead times, and records every time a customer asked for something that wasn’t there.
you steer by what you’re missing out on, not just by what you sellReading in price lists without retyping
Supplier price lists and order confirmations are read in; new purchase prices and lead times come in as a proposal with the consequences for your margin alongside.
your margin is right again, and nobody has to wade through a stack of PDFsAssistant for inside sales
An assistant that knows your own product data, stock and lead times answers the standard questions from colleagues and customers and hands over to a colleague when in doubt.
inside sales has time left for the requests that really need attentionMaking dead stock visible
Items that have sat still for a long time surface with a proposal: promotion, bundle, mark down or return to the supplier.
space in the warehouse and money that starts moving againThe honest bit
- Automatic matching only works if your item master is in order. If there are three variants of the same item in it, it goes wrong. Cleaning up is the first job and that takes time.
- A forecast is not a crystal ball. With new items without history the system gets it wrong too; that’s why it proposes and the buyer decides.
- Less stock isn’t always the goal. Sometimes deliberately holding more stock is smarter, because a missed order costs you more than the storage.
How we start
We start with a core session of four hours for €596 excluding VAT and travel costs, at the trade counter and with inside sales. We follow a request from email to quote and literally count the retyping. Usually reading in requests is the first step, because that’s where you see results fastest and it changes little about your systems. Stock and order proposals come after that, once the item master is in order.
Further reading
From our insights
Most businesses start with the tool and then get stuck. It is better to start with one piece of work that comes back every week and nobody enjoys.
The build costs are usually the easiest part of the bill. The surprises are in the clean-up beforehand, the monthly usage and the maintenance afterwards.