Forward deployed engineering for distribution and wholesale
In distribution the expensive workflow is usually order-to-cash, and the cost concentrates in two places: orders arriving as unstructured email, PDF and phone calls that someone rekeys, and quoting that is slow enough to lose business you had already won on relationship.
The pattern
- Orders arrive in six formats. A person turns all six into one format, by hand, all day.
- A rekeying error becomes a wrong shipment, a return, a credit and a phone call. Four costs from one keystroke.
- Quotes involve checking stock, checking cost, checking who this customer is — and take a day, while a competitor answers in an hour.
- Inventory is accurate in the system and wrong on the shelf, and everybody has a private workaround.
- Backorder communication happens when the customer chases.
What gets measured
| Question | Source |
|---|---|
| How many order lines are manually keyed per week, and how long each takes? | observation |
| What is the error rate per hundred lines, and the full cost of one error? | returns and credits |
| What is average quote turnaround, and close rate by turnaround band? | your own system |
| How many customer contacts are chasing status? | the phones |
| What does an emergency stock check cost when it happens? | ask the warehouse |
The error-cost line is the one distributors habitually undercount. One mis-keyed line is not the picking time — it is the return, the credit note, the re-ship, the phone calls, and the customer's next quote going to somebody else.
What typically gets built
- Order intake that reads the incoming format, structures it, and puts a human on the exceptions only — with the exceptions visible rather than silently guessed.
- Quote assembly that has stock, cost and customer terms in one place.
- Proactive status, so the customer hears about the backorder before they chase it.
- Reconciliation that runs continuously rather than as a quarterly event everybody dreads.
The honest caveat
Automated order intake is where over-promising happens in this industry. A system that reads 95% of orders correctly and silently guesses the other 5% is worse than the person it replaced — the errors are now invisible until they ship.
So the design rule is: everything it is not confident about goes to a human, visibly, with the reason. The measurement is not “how many did it read” but “how many did it read and how many wrong ones did it let through.”
The measurement worksheet → · How an engagement runs →
The workflows we fix in distribution
Distribution margin leaks through four doors: order entry — emailed POs re-keyed by hand, RFQ response — the quote that went out a day late, quote to invoice — the gap between shipping and billing, and client onboarding — the new account that takes a month to set up. Each page covers where it breaks and what a fix looks like.
Who we work with · How an engagement runs · AI agents that do work
Get in touch
Email solutions@ikonic303.dev to start with the measurement. ikonic303 is based in Colorado and works with clients nationwide.