ERP-Integrated Distributor Management System for ADF Foods
16
Distributors ordering on the portal.8
Countries those orders ship to.439K+
Units ordered since go-live.About this engagement
- Industry
- Retail and distribution
- Users
- Distributors, sales heads, country managers and admins
- Timeline
- About ten weeks, a four-person team
- Services
- AI-Native Product Engineering
ADF Foods sells packaged Indian food into export markets. Its distributors order container loads weeks ahead, in US dollars, across dry and frozen lines. Every one of those orders used to arrive as a phone call or an email, for a sales representative to key into the ERP by hand.
SoluteLabs built a distributor management system on top of that ERP rather than in place of it. Distributors place their own export orders and follow them from departure to arrival. Sales heads and country managers read revenue and volume as the orders land, instead of waiting for a spreadsheet that somebody has to assemble first.
The system is live in production and SoluteLabs still supports it.
Two things moved while we built it. Analytics grew past the admin view once sales heads and country managers saw the first demo and asked for targets, drill-downs and trends over time. Role scoping got more granular than the first design assumed. Both stayed configuration changes rather than rewrites, because role-based access went in first.
Solution
One portal over the ERP, not a replacement for it. A distributor signs in, places an export order against the live catalogue and follows it from departure to arrival. A manager signs into the same system and reads revenue by distributor and volume against target.
It runs on Google Cloud. Kinde handles sign-in, and its role claims map straight onto the permission model, so what a person can see is a configuration question rather than an architectural one.
Self-service export ordering
Role-scoped live analytics
Architecture
Four roles sign in once and their claims decide what they are shown. Three modules sit between them and the existing ERP, which keeps processing orders and keeps owning the record. The surface between the two is deliberately narrow, and it stops there.
Deliverables
Export order placement
- A distributor works down the catalogue, sets quantities and submits, with nobody to ring first.
- The order is pushed into the existing ERP on submission, so it enters processing the same way it always did.
- Every order carries a timestamp and an author, which is a record on the distributor's side for the first time.
- If the push into the ERP fails, the distributor gets an order submission error with retry guidance rather than silence.
Tracking and replenishment
- Each order shows the date it leaves, the date it lands and the lead time between them, with its current status beside it.
- Safety stock sits per SKU at three and six months, so a distributor reorders before running out rather than after.
- A suggested order and a repeat-order prompt cover the reorder a distributor was going to place anyway.
Role-scoped sales analytics
- Sales heads, country managers and admins open the same system and each see the slice of the network their role covers.
- Revenue by distributor, volume over time and performance against target, live as the orders land rather than assembled at the end of a week.
- A request for a view outside a role returns a 403 that leaks nothing about what sits behind it.
Outcomes
Three workflows, before and after, counted from the system's own record since go-live. Nothing here is an estimate and nothing is a projection.
Phone and email orders became self-service, with a record attached
An order used to reach a sales representative as a call or an email and get keyed into the ERP by hand.
155+ orders have been confirmed through the portal since go-live, each one timestamped and attributable.
Assembled weekly spreadsheets became live role-scoped dashboards
Revenue and distributor performance were put together by hand, arrived late and drifted between versions.
The same managers now read 2,864 line items across 550+ SKUs as the orders land, in the view their role scopes them to.
No fulfilment visibility became departure to arrival tracking
Once an order was placed, a distributor had no way of seeing where it had got to.
189 orders now carry their departure date, their arrival date and their status in the portal, visible to the distributor who placed them.
Build the Interface Layer Your Systems Are Missing
Your ERP, CRM and internal tools already hold the data. The gap is access: the right workflow, the right dashboard and the right permissions for the people who have to act on it. Let us look at yours.
