Illustrative Example: What a Customer Portal Typically Delivers for a Wholesale Distributor on OrderWise

A Common Starting Point

This is a pattern we see often among UK wholesale distributors running OrderWise: the ERP itself works fine — stock, sales orders, purchasing, and accounting are all handled well — but customers have no way to access any of it themselves. OrderWise is a desktop application accessed through a terminal server; it was never built for customer-facing use.

The result is a sales desk fielding a steady stream of phone calls asking for order status, delivery dates, invoice copies, and stock availability — questions the ERP already has the answer to, but that only staff can retrieve. Each call takes a few minutes. Multiplied across a working day, it adds up to a meaningful chunk of a sales team's time spent on information retrieval rather than selling.

Order accuracy is often part of the same problem: orders taken over the phone are more error-prone than orders placed directly into a system, and errors cost time and money to unwind — returns, re-deliveries, credit notes.

What a Typical Engagement Looks Like

The process is the same one described in full on how Sysgraft engagements work:

• Discovery sprint (3–5 days). On-site observation of how the sales desk and warehouse actually operate, followed by a live API audit against the client's own OrderWise tenant — authenticating, mapping every relevant endpoint, and confirming what is genuinely achievable before any price is fixed.
• Fixed-price build. A branded customer self-service portal connected to OrderWise via its REST API, typically alongside an internal staff operations dashboard so the sales team can see the same data the portal shows customers. No modification to OrderWise itself, and no data migration — the portal reads and writes through the existing API.
• Rollout. Distributors with an existing base of active accounts typically prefer a staged rollout — a smaller group of customers first, working out any friction in onboarding, before opening it to the full customer base.
• Monthly subscription. Hosting, maintenance, and support move to a transparent monthly fee once live, as described on pricing.

Typical Outcomes

Across engagements of this shape, the pattern that tends to hold is straightforward: a large share of the phone traffic that was purely informational — order status, invoice copies, stock checks — moves to the portal, because customers can get the same answer faster by logging in themselves. Order accuracy tends to improve too, since customers entering their own orders removes a step where transcription errors happen. Sales team time freed up from information retrieval typically gets redirected toward proactive account management rather than reactive phone-answering.

The scale of the effect depends heavily on how much of the original call volume was genuinely informational versus relationship-driven — a distributor whose customers value a personal phone relationship will see a smaller shift than one whose calls were mostly "where's my order" queries with no relationship component at all. That is exactly what the discovery sprint is for: finding out which situation applies before any price is fixed.