B2B Distribution: Sales & Order Intelligence
Four distribution businesses. Four data crises. How DataVines helped B2B distributors replace manual chaos with real-time intelligence — and start making decisions at the speed of their operations.
CASE STUDY 01 · B2B DISTRIBUTION · SALES PIPELINE & ORDER INTELLIGENCE
Nobody Knew Which Orders Were at Risk Until the Customer Called
A mid-sized industrial parts distributor across eight states had 14 salespeople, three ERPs, and zero shared visibility into the pipeline. DataVines built the single source of truth that finally made every open order, every at-risk account, and every stalled quote visible in real time.
ABOUT THE CLIENT
A family-owned industrial parts distributor headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, supplying MRO and OEM components to manufacturing plants. They ran a sales team of 14 reps split between three regional offices. Each office managed accounts using a different configuration of their ERP. A fourth order management layer existed only in shared Excel files on a network drive nobody fully trusted.
The Challenge
Every Monday morning, the VP of Sales would spend four hours building a pipeline report. She would open three ERP exports, two regional rep spreadsheets, and a quoting system report, then manually stitch them together in Excel. The finished document landed in inboxes by noon — covering data that was already four to seven days old.
WHERE THINGS BROKE DOWN • Three ERPs, two regional spreadsheets, one quoting system — six sources that had never been consolidated. • Quote follow-up entirely dependent on rep memory — no automated aging flags or escalation logic. • At-risk accounts invisible to leadership until the customer initiated contact or stopped ordering entirely.
The DataVine Solution
The Solution
- Getting the data connected • Built API and file-based integrations pulling daily data from all three ERP instances (SAP Business One, Epicor, and a legacy AS/400 export). • Standardized quote and order status definitions across all three regions. • Built entity resolution logic to de-duplicate accounts.
- Building the dashboard • Built a Looker Studio dashboard with four views: executive pipeline summary, regional comparison, rep-level aging, and product win/loss tracker.
- OPERATIONAL IMPACT & EFFICIENCY • 73% reduction in time spent on order and pipeline tracking per rep per week. • 40+ hours of monthly manual reporting eliminated across sales and ops functions. • Quote follow-up cycle compressed — stalled quotes surfaced in under 24 hours.
- WHAT COMES NEXT DataVines is now building a quote propensity model — using historical win rates and rep activity patterns to score each open quote's close likelihood.
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