A growing network, running on yesterday's numbers.
The distributor had grown the way successful businesses do — by adding warehouses, sales channels and product lines faster than the systems underneath could keep up. Inventory lived in one place, transfers in another, sales and demand in a third. None of them spoke the same language at the same time.
The result was a business making real decisions on stale information. Stock figures were reconciled by hand. A part could show as available in the system and be gone from the shelf. Branch managers spent mornings on the phone confirming what they should have been able to see on a screen. The cost wasn't dramatic — it was constant. A steady drag of manual coordination, double-handling and missed demand that scaled with every new site.
Where the friction actually lived.
- Inventory, transport and sales systems with no shared, real-time view across the network.
- Stock counts reconciled manually — accurate the moment they were taken, wrong soon after.
- Transfers between warehouses tracked over email and spreadsheets rather than system logic.
- Demand signals arriving too late to influence purchasing or rebalancing decisions.
- Operational reporting assembled by hand, days after the events it described.
We connected what was already there.
KEYOB's first move is never to replace. The distributor's teams knew their tools, and ripping them out would have meant months of disruption for a business that couldn't afford to pause. Instead, we did what we do best: we built the operating layer between the systems they already ran.
Through systems integration and ecosystem design, we connected the warehouse, transfer, sales and demand systems into one synchronised flow. On top of it sat an operational reporting and intelligence layer — so the data wasn't just connected, it was visible, live, to the people who needed to act on it.