The distributor you just bought still takes orders its own way
How do we merge an acquired distributor's catalogue and order desk without a year of re-keying?
Figures and rules on this page apply to
United States
Working somewhere else? The shape of the problem usually travels. The deadlines do not.
What this looks like
Day one after closing, the acquired branches still take orders by email, phone and PDF. Their part numbers match nothing in your catalogue. Someone keeps a lookup spreadsheet. Quotes go out on the old price book because nobody is sure which one is right.
The numbers
Every figure here is someone else’s. Check them.
- $31.2bnof US chemical industry sales that pass through distributors rather than going direct
- ~450member and affiliate companies in the US chemical distribution trade body, most of them mid-sized
- 80,000+people employed across the US chemical distribution industry
- $236bnoutput of US chemical and allied products merchant wholesalers in 2023
Why it happens
It is not a people problem.
Two businesses describe the same drum, grade and pack size in different words. The ERP can hold both item lists. It cannot decide that two codes mean one product. That decision lives in the heads of the people at the order desk.
Why your current software has not fixed it
Because it was never built to.
The ERP migration is the official answer, and it is scheduled for a year from now. Until then the acquired desk runs on its own system and habits. Integration software moves records between systems. It does not agree what a record means, so the lookup spreadsheet keeps growing.
Intelligence, plumbed in
An emailed order that says 'same as last time, four totes' is readable, and it can be matched.
We build the layer that says which of their codes is which of yours, then read every incoming order through it. Underneath it: a connector, one agreed meaning per field, and a test set scored on your own records.
How we make AI survive real data-
Connectors -
A semantic layer -
Evals you can check
However hard, whatever it is
An add-on is one example. Bring the merger you are halfway through.
We wrote this about distribution because the pace of add-ons makes the gap visible. The same layer works for any two businesses sharing one catalogue.
-
01 We sit with you
Days where the work happens, not a workshop in a meeting room. We watch the job get done and write down the shortcuts nobody wrote down.
-
02 We read everything
Your data, your rules, your vendors and their documentation, and the published research on your sector. We report what is actually in there.
-
03 We break it to first principles
Not which tool fixes this. What is actually causing it, taken apart until we reach the piece that cannot be divided further.
-
04 Then we build
Weeks, not quarters. By this point we are not guessing what to build, and guessing is the thing that makes projects long.
What we build
Specific enough to argue with.
Four mechanisms, not four features. Each one is a thing that happens on its own, every day, whether or not anyone remembers to run it.
-
Orders read on arrival from email, PDF and web forms, whichever business they reach.
-
One agreed product meaning above both catalogues, so an acquired code resolves to your item without re-keying.
-
Quotes drafted against the correct price book, with conflicts flagged to a person rather than guessed.
-
Safety data sheets and certificates of analysis filed against the right item, across both businesses.
How you would know it worked
Numbers in your own reporting, not ours.
- Share of the acquired business's orders entered without a person re-keying them.
- Hours from order received to order confirmed, measured separately for each legacy desk.
- Count of pricing disputes traced to the wrong price book, which should fall to near zero.
Straight answers
Where a model is involved, it is scored against your own records first. Accuracy per source, not one flattering average.
The questions this raises
-
We are moving everyone to one ERP. Why not wait?
Because the move needs the product mapping anyway. Building it first shortens the migration and pays for itself in the months before.
-
Our acquired branches will not change how customers order.
They should not have to. The orders are read in whatever form they arrive, which is the point.
-
How long before the acquired desk sees a difference?
Order intake usually lands first, in weeks. The catalogue mapping improves as each confirmed match is kept.
Where the figures come from
We did not make these up, and you should not take our word for them.
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics: labor productivity and output by detailed industry, NAICS 4246
- US Census Bureau: NAICS 4246, chemical and allied products merchant wholesalers
- Alliance for Chemical Distribution: distributor membership and industry figures
- Alliance for Chemical Distribution: home and industry overview
Also in supply chain
The official inventory number arrives six weeks after the month it describes
Federal inventories data is published roughly six weeks after the reference month closes. Most internal reporting runs on a similar lag, for the same reasons.
ProblemThe order confirmation came back different from the order you placed
Dealers place one project's order across many manufacturers. Each maker confirms it in its own format, and the lines that changed are easy to miss.
ProblemYour trucks, warehouses and freight desk each hold part of one customer's margin
Logistics groups grow by buying carriers, warehouses and freight brokers. Each one keeps its own shipment and billing records. Nobody can see one customer's full margin.
ProblemEvery product in the catalogue now answers to two rulebooks
A lab distributor that buys a UK business now sells under EU and GB rules at once. Each product's deadline sits in a supplier letter or certificate.
The meaning is not in any schema
Two systems agree on the field and disagree on what it means.
The rule lives in a document, or in what one site has always called something, or in a habit nobody wrote down. Joining the data is the easy half; agreeing what it means is the half that is actually the work.
- Behavioral healthOne in four facilities still run on paper, and there is a reason
- Accounting & consultingAn eight-hundred-billion-dollar quarter built on hours recalled from memory
- Senior livingNobody wants a sixth dashboard
- Skilled nursingEvery building reports. Nobody can see the portfolio.
- ManufacturingEvery plant you add keeps its own production record
Consent rules, site vocabulary, what an hour counts as. Wherever two systems agree on a field and not on what it means.Describe the disagreement.
The integration is a vocabulary problem before it is a systems problem.
We build the layer that says which of their codes is which of yours, then read every incoming order through it.
See everything we build-
Software -
Hardware -
Ways of working -
Whole ventures
Is this happening to you? Tell us the size of it.
Twenty minutes. We will tell you honestly whether the numbers justify doing anything about it.