Counts never matched the floor, and every change meant a SuiteScript ticket and a wait. With renewal 90 days out, this distributor moved to one AI-native system it owns instead of re-signing, and on-time fulfillment went from the high 70s to the mid 90s.
Counts never matched what the floor actually held. Reps checked the warehouse by hand before promising a part, oversells still slipped through, and 2 to 5% of stock quietly aged into NRND and EOL before it got written off. Customer contract pricing lived in a spreadsheet only one person fully understood.
Underneath sat a legacy cloud ERP the distributor had grown into for real financials and inventory across thousands of SKUs. It delivered those, along with per-module licensing, a long implementation, and a SuiteScript developer on retainer for anything bespoke. Every process change was a change request and a wait, true margin by SKU and by customer lived in Excel exports, and the CRM and warehouse system sat outside the core, so the same order was re-keyed across three places.
With renewal 90 days out, re-signing meant locking in another year of the same, on data held on the vendor's terms. So the team scoped the alternative instead.
Thousands of SKUs with serial and date-code traceability and allocated-vs-available stock, so reps stop overselling and the standalone warehouse system is gone.
POs, sales orders, and fulfillment run alongside inventory, so an order updates stock and the ledger at once, with no manual warehouse check.
Ledger, AP, and AR live in-system on the company's own database, and month-end closes in days instead of two weeks of exports.
Accounts, quotes, and per-customer contract pricing sit next to orders. A new pricing tier ships the same afternoon by describing the rule in plain language, not a SuiteScript request scoped in weeks.
Margin by SKU and customer is visible in-system, so the team stopped rebuilding it in Excel. New views ship by asking the AI.
Because inventory, orders, and the ledger live in one system, an operator can act across them under approvals the team controls, instead of waiting for someone to notice and re-key.