Order management is margin. Orchestrated on your platform.
B2B order flow from quote to shipment for industry and wholesale — without platform replacement. Three levers: automate intake, real-time availability, defined approval paths. €30 to €50 per manually resolved order (Forrester). At 5,000 orders per quarter, around €600,000 in annual margin disappears between ERP, shop, warehouse, and field sales. That's where we come in.
A typical B2B order passes through seven stations — from quote to invoice. Without orchestration, four of them require manual intervention. Here we show where margin leaks out and which data is missing between which systems.
Sales rep + Excel
Manual input into ERP
ERP knows nothing of shop inventory
Allocation conflicts between channels
WMS order from ERP
Carrier connection handled manually per order
From ERP, provided pricing is correct
Four of seven stations require manual intervention. At 5,000 orders per quarter that's 20,000 avoidable touchpoints per year.
Across ten mandates, three recurring levers: automate order entry, make availability transparent, make approval workflows decision-ready. Each lever feeds directly into margin — no platform swap required.
Incoming orders from email, EDI, portal, and field sales app land directly structured in the ERP. No duplicate entry, no typos, no clarification calls. A self-service portal deflects 30–40% of phone orders from repeat customers.
Available-to-Promise pulls data from ERP, WMS, and supplier master data synchronously. No more "I'll call you back" on the phone, no backorder surprises, no cancellations from inventory shock. Reduces out-of-stock cancellations and protects margin.
Multi-level approval for discounts, special terms, and credit-critical orders. Automatic routing by volume, customer, and risk. Quote-to-cash cycle drops from days to a few hours — without sales waiting on approval bottlenecks.
The biggest carrying-cost levers lie in multi-warehouse ATP, slow-mover identification, and order-prioritized reservation. Here concretely what orchestrated inventory transparency delivers — without a new WMS platform.
Source: EY B2B Operations Benchmark 2024 · Aberdeen Group · DHL B2B Logistics Report
On a €50M inventory, that means roughly €3M in margin back in-house — annually, without a new platform, purely through clean orchestration. The lever scales with inventory size: some effects scale linearly, some less — noticeable also on smaller stock.
Field sales and inside sales are the people whose daily work we make easier. CPQ, B2B portal, reorder engine, mobile sales — the four building blocks that systematically eliminate manual clarification and free up sales time for new business.
Configuration logic, discount rules, customer-specific pricing — as code in the platform, not as an Excel file on the field rep's laptop. Quote in minutes, not days. Salesforce CPQ, SAP Variant Configurator, Spryker-native — we choose the path that fits your ERP stack.
Repeat customers order on their negotiated terms, see real-time availability, and trigger reorders with one click. 85% of B2B organizations operate self-service portals today — those still without in 2026 are systematically eroding repeat customer loyalty.
ML detects order cycles per customer and suggests follow-up orders — directly in the field sales dashboard and the customer portal. Repeat customer retention increases, field reps gain time for new business instead of routine reorders. A classic sales lever that protects margin through low-maintenance account management.
Field reps capture orders directly at the customer. Availability, pricing, approval in one app — offline-capable. No return to the office for clarification, no phone round with inside sales. The order leaves the customer meeting live, not as an email at the end of the day.
We build with you, not for you. Engagements are workbenches, not theatre. Delivery in short loops. Clean handover, then your team carries it alone.
Method in detail
25 years in IT, 14 of them in B2B commerce. Architecture mandates with large enterprises, building and steering distributed expert teams, vendor-neutral project rescue. Focus areas: platform architecture, project rescue, team operations.
Chris Zepernick
The most expensive order is the one touched twice. We reduce manual clarification — your people focus on customers, not on Excel bridges between systems.
How we workWhere are you losing margin in the order pipeline? A few minutes on the phone — we listen, then tell you where the lever is.
