Case Study: How a UK wholesale distributor Cut Phone Calls by 60% With a Customer Portal Connected to OrderWise

Executive Summary

a UK wholesale distributor is a UK wholesale distributor of industrial supplies and safety equipment. With £18 million in annual turnover and 45 employees, the company had been running its business on OrderWise since 2018. The ERP managed stock, sales orders, purchasing, and accounting — it worked well enough that replacing it was never on the table.

But by early 2025, a growing pain had become critical: customers were phoning the sales desk 60+ times a day asking for order status, delivery dates, invoice copies, and stock availability. Each call ate 2–4 minutes of a salesperson’s time. The team was spending over 15 hours a week on information retrieval that customers could—and should—have been able to do themselves.

Sysgraft built a branded customer self-service portal connected to OrderWise via its REST API, alongside an internal staff operations dashboard. The project delivered:

The project took 10 weeks from kick-off to first customer go-live. No modifications were made to OrderWise. No data was migrated. The portal sits entirely on top of the existing ERP, reading and writing through the OrderWise REST API.

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The Company

a UK wholesale distributor supplies industrial consumables — workwear, gloves, eyewear, cleaning chemicals, tools, and site safety equipment — to construction firms, manufacturing plants, and local authorities across the South East of England. Headquartered in Reading, Berkshire, the company operates from a 40,000 sq ft warehouse and processes around 250 orders per day.

They have been using OrderWise since 2018, when they migrated from a legacy Sage 50 setup. The ERP handles everything: sales order processing, purchase ordering, stock management, warehouse picking, despatch, invoicing, and financials. The company’s managing director, the Managing Director, describes OrderWise as “a solid workhorse” that does exactly what they need from a back-office perspective.

The customer base is diverse: around 400 active accounts ranging from large contractors placing weekly bulk orders to small independent builders who order ad hoc. Around 40 of these accounts generate the majority of transaction volume.

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The Problem

By late 2024, the company’s sales desk was creaking under the weight of inbound phone traffic. The root causes were straightforward:

• No customer-facing access to OrderWise. Customers could not check stock, order status, or view invoices without calling. OrderWise is a desktop application accessed through a terminal server — it was never designed for customer-facing use.
• 60+ calls per day asking “Has my order been despatched?” “When will it arrive?” “Can I get a copy of the invoice?” “Do you have this item in stock?”
• Sales team spending 3+ hours daily on information retrieval. The internal sales desk handles phone orders as well, so every interrupted minute came at the expense of revenue-generating activity.
• A 4% order error rate on phone-placed orders. The wrong product code, the wrong quantity, the wrong delivery address — these errors were costing roughly £1,200 per month in returns, re-delivery charges, and staff time to resolve.
• Customer frustration from relying on a 9-to-5 phone line. Customers placing orders after 5pm, or wanting to check weekend delivery status, had no option but to wait until the next business day.

“We were running a distribution business in 2025 where your only way to talk to us was a phone call during office hours,” says the Managing Director. “It felt archaic. Our customers expected to be able to log in and see their order history, their invoices, their stock prices — the same way they can on any B2C website. We were a decade behind their expectations.”

the company’s management team considered two options before calling Sysgraft:

1. Replace OrderWise with a system that includes a customer portal — an estimated £150k–£250k project with 12+ months of disruption, and the risk that the new system would not handle their complex pricing matrix.
2. Buy a B2B e-commerce platform like Magento or Shopify — but these would not connect deeply enough to OrderWise for live stock and pricing, and the quoted integration costs were pushing £30k–£60k for something that still would not handle order status enquiries or invoice downloads.

Neither option was acceptable. They needed a portal that connected directly to OrderWise — real-time, no data duplication, no replacement.

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The Solution

Sysgraft built two connected applications:

1. the customer portal (branded as “the portal”)

A password-protected, B2C-style web portal where each customer logs in and sees only their own data. Features include:

• Live order tracking — current status, despatch date, carrier tracking number. Updated in real time from OrderWise.
• Invoice and statement download — PDF copies generated from the OrderWise invoice record, available for the previous 24 months.
• Live stock availability — customer-specific pricing displayed alongside current stock levels.
• Order placement — customers can submit new orders via a basket-style interface. Orders are written back to OrderWise in real time as sales orders.
• Account history — full transaction history with filters by date range, invoice status, and order type.
• Document library — delivery notes, credit notes, and statements available for self-service download.

2. Staff Dashboard

An internal operations dashboard for the company’s warehouse and sales teams:

• Live order board — all orders in the system with status indicators, filtering, and search.
• Pick list view — warehouse operators see their assigned picks without navigating OrderWise screens.
• Customer activity feed — visibility into which customers are using the portal, what they are viewing, and recent order activity.
• Quick lookup — instant order, customer, and stock search without opening the full OrderWise client.

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Architecture

Both applications connect to OrderWise exclusively through its REST API. No direct database access. No modifications to OrderWise itself.

OrderWise ERP
(Existing system, untouched)
         │
         │ REST API (HTTPS)
         │ API key authentication
         ▼
Sysgraft API Adapter Layer
  · OrderWise API client
  · Request/response transformation
  · Caching (30s TTL for stock, 5min for customers)
  · Rate-limit management
  · Idempotency keys for order submission
         │
         ▼
Application Layer (Next.js · TypeScript)
         │
   ┌─────┴─────┐
   ▼           ▼
the company      Staff
Online        Dashboard
(Customer)    (Internal)

Key design decisions:

• No data migration. All data lives in OrderWise. The portal reads and writes in real time. If the portal goes offline, OrderWise continues working as normal.
• API adapter isolation. The adapter layer handles all OrderWise-specific integration logic. If the OrderWise API changes, only the adapter needs updating. If the company ever replaces OrderWise, the adapter is the only component that changes — the frontend applications remain the same.
• Customer-level data isolation. Portal users authenticate via email-and-password, with accounts linked to their OrderWise customer record. The system enforces row-level security: a customer can never see another customer’s orders, prices, or invoices.
• UK data residency. Hosted on AWS London (eu-west-2). Backups encrypted at rest. TLS 1.3 in transit.

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The Build

The project followed Sysgraft’s standard three-phase approach.

Phase 1: Discovery Sprint (2 weeks)

Sysgraft spent two weeks on-site at the company’s warehouse and head office. The team shadowed the sales desk, watched warehouse operators process picks, and sat with customer service to understand the most common phone queries.

During this sprint, Sysgraft also performed a live audit of the OrderWise REST API: authenticating against the live system, enumerating available endpoints, testing read and write operations against real data, and documenting which data fields were available and which were not. The audit revealed that OrderWise’s API covered sales orders, customers, stock items, invoices, and delivery tracking — everything needed for the portal scope.

At the end of the sprint, the company received a pain-point map, a full API audit report, wireframes for both the customer portal and staff dashboard, and a fixed-price build proposal.

Phase 2: Fixed-Price Build (8 weeks)

Against the agreed scope, Sysgraft built the full platform over 8 weeks. The team used React, Next.js, and TypeScript. Weekly sprint demos kept the company’s management team involved throughout.

The build included:

• Weeks 1–2: API adapter layer, authentication, data isolation, core data models
• Weeks 3–5: Customer portal — order tracking, invoice download, stock lookup, order placement
• Weeks 6–7: Staff dashboard — order board, pick list view, customer activity feed, quick lookup
• Week 8: Testing, UAT, security review, DNS configuration, go-live preparation

Phase 3: Phased Rollout (2 weeks)

Rather than a single big-bang launch, the company rolled out the portal in three waves of 10–15 customers each. This allowed the team to resolve any teething problems with a small group before exposing the portal to the full customer base.

• Wave 1 (Week 9): 12 high-volume customers. Invited via email with login instructions and a 5-minute video guide. the company’s sales team called each customer to walk them through the portal.
• Wave 2 (Week 10): 15 medium-volume customers. Rolled out with an email campaign and a live 30-minute onboarding webinar.
• Wave 3 (Week 11): Remaining active accounts. General announcement via email and invoice inserts.

90 days after Wave 1, 85% of active customers had logged in at least once, and 62% were using the portal at least twice a week.

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Results

Six months after go-live, the measurable impact was significant across every dimension the company cared about.

Call volume reduced by 60%

Inbound phone calls to the sales desk dropped from an average of 62 per day to 24 per day. The remaining calls are primarily new order placement (customers who still prefer phoning) and complex queries that genuinely require human interaction. The “Where is my order?” and “Can I get an invoice?” calls that previously made up 70% of the volume have virtually disappeared.

Order errors reduced by 90%

The 4% error rate on phone-placed orders has been nearly eliminated. Customers placing orders through the portal see their basket contents, confirm quantities, and select delivery addresses from their saved address book. The portal validates product codes in real time and flags out-of-stock items before the order is submitted. Error-related costs dropped from approximately £1,200 per month to less than £150 per month.

Sales team reclaimed 12 hours per week

the company’s internal sales desk of four people collectively reclaimed approximately 12 hours per week that had previously been spent on information retrieval. Those hours have been redirected to proactive customer outreach: calling dormant accounts, following up on quotes, and building relationships with high-potential customers.

“The difference is night and day,” says the Sales Manager, the company’s Sales Manager. “Before the portal, my team spent the first hour of every morning answering ‘has my order gone out?’ calls. Now we spend that hour calling customers who haven’t ordered in 90 days. Our outbound call volume has actually increased, and it is generating real revenue.”

Customer satisfaction improved from 6.2 to 8.9

the company runs a quarterly Net Promoter-style survey with its top 100 customers. The overall experience score rose from 6.2 out of 10 (Q4 2024, before the portal) to 8.9 out of 10 (Q2 2026). Survey comments frequently cite the portal as a primary reason for the improvement.

Invoice queries reduced by 45%

Finance-related phone calls — invoice copies, statement queries, payment allocation — dropped by 45%. Customers can now download invoices and view their statement from the portal, reducing the burden on the company’s part-time finance administrator.

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What the Customer Said

Beyond the numbers, the most telling feedback came from the company’s customers themselves. Here are three responses from the post-launch survey:

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Key Lessons

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Would They Do It Again?

Six months in, the Managing Director is unequivocal.

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