About
The last job in distribution still done entirely by hand.
Almost everything else in a distribution business has been through a system by now. Purchasing, inventory, routing, invoicing, payments. The order still arrives as a document and somebody still reads it out loud to a keyboard.
Why this, and why now
It only became
possible recently.
Reading a clean, predictable form is an old problem and it was solved long ago. Reading a skewed fax of a form somebody filled in by hand, in a layout you have never seen, and knowing which column is the quantity — that is a very recent capability.
Which is why the honest answer to “why has nobody done this” is that people have been trying for twenty years, and until recently the only version that worked required building a template per customer. That works right up until you have four hundred customers.
The product is not built yet. The brand, this site and the arithmetic behind it are real; the screens are designs. We would rather say that here than have you find out later.
What we think
Four opinions this
product is built on.
The customer will not change
Twenty years of EDI projects have proved this. Your biggest accounts joined, everybody else did not, and the long tail still sends whatever they feel like. Any product that begins by asking your customers to do something differently has already lost.
A confident mistake is the expensive one
Software that is right 97% of the time and silent about the other 3% is worse than software that asks. The wrong pallet leaves the building either way, but only one of them gave you a chance to stop it.
The person stays
This does not remove the order desk. It removes the typing from the order desk, which is a different thing, and the people doing that job have opinions about the customers worth keeping.
Boring is the goal
The best outcome is that in six months nobody talks about it, the queue is empty by ten, and the person who used to key orders is doing something that needed a person.
Talk to us before you are ready.
We are more useful early, when you can still tell us the product is wrong. Reach us at [email protected].