Manufacturing / building-products trade supply· anonymised· Phase 1 signed off
From phone-and-memory to one clean flow.
We replaced informal, ad-hoc order-taking with a full trade portal — account-specific pricing, catalogue, ordering, production records and dispatch, all in one workflow. Phase 1 signed off.
Client: A UK plastics manufacturer and trade supplier.
When the pricing lives in someone’s head
Plenty of manufacturers run on relationships and memory. Trade customers ring up or email; someone who knows the account remembers their pricing; orders get handled ad hoc; production and dispatch are tracked wherever there’s room. It works — right up until the person who remembers is off sick, or the order volume grows, or a price gets quoted wrong and eats the margin.
This manufacturer had exactly that: informal order-taking and per-customer pricing that lived in people’s heads rather than a system. They needed to turn it into a repeatable, reliable workflow — without losing the account-specific pricing their trade relationships depend on.
A complete trade portal, plus a brand refresh
We built a full trade portal covering the whole order lifecycle. On the customer side: a public brochure site, secure passwordless login for trade customers, and a portal showing their own account-specific pricing, the catalogue, ordering, and quick repeat/reorder.
On the staff side: a workspace for managing customers, products and price rules, an order queue, production records, dispatch records, and invoice drafts. At the centre is a multi-unit pricing matrix — feet, metres, square feet, square metres, or each — with bulk reprice, plus handling for cross-border orders into Ireland. And because first impressions count in trade too, we delivered a complete brand redesign across every surface.
The demo was seeded from the client’s own real price-list workbook, giving a realistic system loaded with around 74 customers, 888 products and 1,263 price rules on day one.
A usable foundation first, then the rest
Rather than hold everything back for one enormous launch, we delivered Phase 1 as a signed-off, usable foundation the client could review and trust — order-to-dispatch working end to end, staged behind secure access. Deeper accounting integration and full invoicing are deliberately scoped into Phase 2, so the client gets value early and we build on proven ground.
It’s built the way we build everything: proper software, tested end to end, staged for review before it goes fully live.
Order-to-dispatch, digitised
- Phase 1 signed off (April 2026) as a usable foundation.
- Order → production → dispatch → invoice-draft now runs as one workflow instead of ad-hoc handling.
- Per-customer pricing is computed by a rules engine, not remembered.
- Live hosted preview running behind secure access, staged for client review.
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