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One of the five sectors
Digital systems for Canadianmanufacturing and distribution.
Manufacturers and distributors sell the same catalogue at different prices to different customers, and most of the working day goes on answering questions the systems already know the answer to.
One catalogue that knows the price, and a customer who can see their own order without phoning.
Know what you are building? Book a discovery call. Not sure where the problem is? Request the audit.
HUREAL / Material studies
In your words
Soundslike this?
Our inside sales desk spends the morning answering where is my order.
Every trade customer has their own price and it lives in the ERP, not on the site.
Our largest account tells us how they want documents exchanged, and we do it by hand.
The product data on the site and the product data in the ERP have drifted apart.
A distributor asks for a specification sheet and somebody goes looking in a folder.
We ship to the United States and the paperwork is a person's job.
Reordering means a customer emailing a list and somebody typing it in.
If the recognisable line is about price, the place to start is E-commerce platforms, where one catalogue serving a list price and an agreed account price is the whole design.
The operational shape
One catalogue,many agreed prices.
Three things shape almost every digital decision in this sector, and the first one is why so much distribution software looks like it was built for retail and then apologised for.
Price is a relationship, not a number
The list price is the least interesting price in the business. What matters is the price agreed with a specific account, on specific volumes, with specific terms, and it lives in the ERP because that is where credit and cost live too.
Any customer facing system here either reads that price or is wrong. A storefront that shows a list price to a trade account is a storefront that account will not use, and the phone order it was meant to replace comes back the same week.
The large account sets the rules
Once a retailer or a national distributor is a meaningful share of revenue, they specify how purchase orders, shipping notices and invoices are exchanged, and often the barcode and product data standards that go with them. That is not negotiable and it is not a technology preference.
Practically, it means a system in this sector has to be able to speak two dialects at once: yours, and whatever your largest customer requires of you.
The work concentrates on the inside desk
Order status, stock availability, account price, delivery date, invoice copy, return authorisation. Each answer takes a minute, every one of them exists in a system, and together they are most of the working day for a team of people.
The second concentration is product data: specifications, drawings, certificates and safety documents, which live in more places than anybody wants to admit and get requested constantly.
What we are not claiming. Nothing here suggests this sector is behind. The reason so much of it runs on the phone and on spreadsheets is that the alternatives were built for businesses with one price and no document obligations, and an honest first project in this sector usually starts by admitting that.
The jobs
Four jobs a systemdoes on the desk.
Each one is a job rather than a feature, and each has a number your team already tracks somewhere. The third column names the measure rather than a value.
| The job | What it looks like here | The number it moves |
|---|---|---|
| Show the agreed price | One catalogue, one storefront. A signed in trade account sees the price you agreed, their own history and reordering. Anyone else sees the list price. | Share of trade orders placed without a phone call or an email. |
| Answer the status question | Order status, stock, delivery date and invoice copies available to the customer at any hour, read from the ERP rather than from a copy. | Inside sales hours per week spent answering questions with an existing answer. |
| Publish the product data once | Specifications, drawings, certificates and safety documents on pages rather than in folders, generated from the system that owns the data. | Time between a specification being requested and a specification being sent. |
| Make reordering a button | A repeat order placed from history, at the agreed price, with the delivery address already known. | Reorder frequency, and the share of reorders that arrive without a person typing them. |
Scroll the table sideways to read it.
Sized with your own numbers
What the inside deskis spending its day on.
The most common first project here is removing the status call, so here is the sum that sizes it. Every figure is yours. We do not publish a call volume or a deflection rate for distribution, because we would be inventing one.
| The number | Where you already have it | Your figure |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound calls and emails a week | Your phone system report, and your shared inbox. | your figure |
| Share of them that are status, stock, price or invoice copies | Ask the inside sales desk to tally one week. | your figure |
| Minutes per one, including the interruption | The interruption is the expensive half, and it is longer than the answer. | your figure |
| Fully loaded cost of an inside sales hour | Your payroll system. | your figure |
| Share of them a portal could answer without a person | Decided in design: which questions have an answer already sitting in a system. | your figure |
| Hours a month those questions consume | Calls, times the share, times the minutes, across a month. | the result |
| What that is worth a month | The line above, multiplied by the hourly cost. | the result |
This is an arithmetic, not a claim. Every figure is yours, and the one that decides the project is the last: the share of those questions that genuinely have an answer sitting in a system. Where the answer is different every time, a portal will not help and we will say so. The same sum runs for reorder handling and for document requests.
By category
What a distributionbuild connects to.
By category, with the systems this sector actually runs. In distribution the ERP is almost always the system of record, and everything else is a question of what it will let you read.
ERP
Where price, cost, stock, credit and account terms are true.
SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Epicor, Sage X3, SYSPROWarehouse and inventory
Where the physical count and the pick, pack and ship actually happen.
a warehouse management system, an ERP module, a third party warehouseDocument exchange with large accounts
Where purchase orders, shipping notices and invoices are exchanged in the format an account requires.
electronic data interchange over a value added network, or direct connectionsProduct data
Where specifications, attributes, drawings and certificates are supposed to be maintained once.
a product information system, an ERP module, your own databaseBarcode and identification standards
Where product identifiers and barcodes come from when a retailer requires them.
GS1 Canada, your own item masterCRM
Where the account, the owner and the opportunity live.
Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics, an in house registerTransport and customs
Where rates, documents and cross border paperwork are produced.
a transport management system, your carriers, your customs brokerAccounting
Where the invoice has to reconcile.
QuickBooks, Sage, Xero, the ERP itself
Every connection is validated by HUREAL's engineers during scoping and confirmed in writing before signature. Where a system genuinely cannot be connected, you hear it during discovery rather than during the build, and the scope is drawn around it instead of making a platform migration the price of entry.
What a build here is designed around
What a build herehas to be designed around.
Manufacturing and distribution carry product and trade requirements that a general business system does not. These are the ones a build here is designed around, and the line between what we build and what your counsel decides.
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Labelling and product informationThe Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act, and sector rules where they apply
What we design forPrepackaged consumer products sold in Canada carry mandatory label information, and some of it has to appear in both official languages. Where a site publishes product information, the source of truth is the same record the label is generated from rather than a second description written for marketing.
What we document for your counselWhich product fields are published, which system each one comes from, and when each was last verified, so your counsel is reviewing one list rather than a website.
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Cross border tradeCUSMA, and the Canada Border Services Agency
What we design forGoods claiming preferential treatment need origin information that somebody can produce on request, and commercial importers account for duties and taxes through the agency's own portal and their own business number. Systems that quote or invoice across the border are designed so the data a broker needs exists as fields rather than as a note.
What we document for your counselWhich origin and classification fields the system holds, where each is entered, and who is accountable for keeping it current.
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Hazardous products and dangerous goodsWHMIS and the Hazardous Products Regulations, and the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Regulations where they apply
What we design forSafety data sheets and labels have to be available to the people who need them, and shipping regulated goods carries document and training requirements. Where a site publishes safety documents, they are versioned, dated and generated from the system that owns them rather than uploaded by hand.
What we document for your counselWhich documents are published, their version and date, and the process that replaces one when it changes.
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Food and regulated goodsThe Safe Food for Canadians Regulations, where the business handles food
What we design forLicensing, traceability and preventive controls apply to businesses that import, export or trade food interprovincially. A system here is scoped so lot and traceability data is a field rather than a free text note, and so a recall question can be answered from records rather than from memory.
What we document for your counselWhich traceability fields the system holds and how far back, so the answer to a recall question is a query rather than a search.
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Privacy and accessibilityPIPEDA, provincial privacy legislation, WCAG 2.2 AA, and AODA where it applies
What we design forA trade portal holds account information and buying history, which is personal information about the people who use it. Scoped access, retention per record type, and every surface a person uses tested with a keyboard and a screen reader rather than asserted to work.
What we document for your counselWhat is held, where, for how long, who can reach it, and the accessibility test results per surface with the standard tested against.
HUREAL designs to a standard, tests against it, and documents what was built. The determination is your counsel's to make, and a vendor offering to make it for them is offering something they do not have. Our own conformance target and how to report a barrier are on the accessibility page.
Where to start
Which of the eightmatter most here.
Four services, and the reason in each
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E-commerce platforms
One catalogue, one storefront, two prices. A signed in trade account seeing the price you agreed is the single design decision that decides whether a distribution storefront gets used or ignored.
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Integrations and Data
The ERP is the system of record for price, stock, credit and terms, and nothing customer facing here is true unless it reads from it. In this sector the connection usually is the project.
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Customer portals and booking
Order status, invoice copies, document requests and reordering are the four things the inside desk answers all day, and each of them has an answer already sitting in a system.
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Agentic Operating Systems
A request for quotation arrives as an email with an attachment, and somebody reads it, matches it to an account and retypes it. That is reading, matching and re-keying, which is exactly the work that should stop at the door.
Read on this
Articles about account pricing, product data and trade portals will live under the Insights index.
three articles to set
Asked and answered
What manufacturersand distributors ask.
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Can the site show each customer their own price?
Yes, and it is the design at the centre of this sector. One catalogue and one storefront serve both, with the signed in account seeing the price agreed with them, their history and reordering. A separate trade store is two catalogues to maintain and two places to be wrong.
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Will this connect to our ERP?
Usually, and we check yours by name during discovery. What matters is not whether the ERP has a way in, but which fields it will give up and in which direction, and that is a question answered before signature rather than during the build.
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Our largest account dictates how we exchange documents. Does that change things?
It changes the scope rather than the answer. A system here has to speak both your process and whatever your largest customer requires, and the requirement is treated as a fixed input in scoping rather than as something to be negotiated later.
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Our product data is a mess. Where do we start?
With the question of which system should own each field, which is usually a shorter conversation than people expect. Some fields can be published today, some need one source cleaned first, and you hear which is which before you commit to anything.
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Do we have to replace our current store?
Usually not. The engine handles money and inventory well and the storefront is what decides whether trade customers use it. In most projects we rebuild the storefront and keep the engine, and if a move is really warranted you see the arithmetic first.
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Who owns what you build?
You do. The code, the content, the customer data and the accounts are yours with admin access from day one, and your product and pricing data stays in the system that already owns it rather than being copied into ours.
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What does it cost?
The build price is set after the discovery call and sent in a written proposal, because an honest number needs the scope, and here the scope is mostly the catalogue and the ERP connection. The number is written into the signed scope and does not move once it is signed.
Close
Two ways to start.Both end with a document you own.
Book a discovery call
For when you know which part of the desk is losing time and want the scope before the spend. A discovery call with inside sales and whoever owns the ERP. We fill in the arithmetic above with your own figures, and afterwards you get a written proposal with a scope, a price and a timeline you can sign or walk away from.
Book a discovery callRequest a performance audit
For when you want the evidence before the decision. We look at what you have against the job you want it to do, and give you a prioritised plan with the arithmetic attached. The document is yours either way.
Request a performance auditKnow what you are building? Book a discovery call. Not sure where the problem is? Request the audit. If neither is right for you, we will say so, and tell you what is.
Not ready for either? Talk to the demonstration in your browser for three minutes, or paste your own address and hear it answer as your business. No form and no booking, and the transcript arrives by email a minute later.
Hear it work
One catalogue that knows the price.
HUREAL / Material studies