You will not find a wall of logos here. Here is what you will find instead.
Wholara is a young company, and we are not going to pad this page with borrowed credibility. No invented case studies, no unnamed "leading distributor", no percentage improvements with no denominator. What we can show you honestly is exactly how distributors use the platform, what changes in the first weeks, and precisely how the result gets measured.
Our position on social proof
A testimonial from a company that does not exist is worse than no testimonial at all, because it tells you something true about the vendor. Distribution is a small industry where reputations travel faster than marketing does.
So this page does something different. It documents the operational patterns we build for, the baselines you should capture before you start, and the measures that decide whether a rollout is working. When we have customers willing to be named, they will be named, with their own words and their own numbers.
If you want a reference call, ask for one. During evaluation we will connect you with a distributor running the workflow you care about, so you can ask the questions a reference call is actually for.
Five ways distributors start.
Nearly every rollout we plan looks like one of these. The pattern you choose determines the timeline, the people involved and the first measure that moves.
The replenishment-first rollout
Typical starting point: a distributor with one or two warehouses, 8,000–25,000 SKUs, and a service-level problem that shows up as emergency orders and air freight.
Purchasing lead, one or two buyers, operations manager
Item master, supplier lead times, service-level targets by category, reorder logic, approval thresholds
Weeks, not quarters — the item data usually exists and the rules are decisions, not development
What changes on the buyer's desk
Instead of rebuilding a purchase plan from a stock report each week, the buyer opens a grouped exception list: these items are below target cover inside their lead time, here is the supplier, here is the proposed quantity and here is why. Routine lines are bought automatically within the buyer's approval limit. The buyer's judgement goes where it is actually needed — new items, promotional buys, supplier negotiations, seasonal planning.
Baseline to capture first
Service level by category, stock value at cost, aged stock over 180 days, and the number of emergency purchases in the last quarter.
Measure that should move
Service level on A-class lines, and emergency freight spend. Both are objective and both are already tracked somewhere.
Common delay
Supplier lead times recorded as a single number when reality varies by item. We derive them from your receipt history instead.
The order-desk rollout
Typical starting point: a distributor processing several hundred order lines a day, with staff re-keying EDI, email and portal orders into an ERP that cannot ingest them cleanly.
Order desk lead, customer service, IT or the integration partner
Customer records, price agreements, EDI or document ingestion, substitution policy, credit rules
Dependent on the integration surface — a clean EDI path is fast; a bespoke legacy interface takes longer
What changes on the order desk
Orders land in one queue already priced, credit-checked and stock-checked. Staff stop being a data-entry layer and become an exception desk: the unknown part number, the price that does not match, the order that cannot make its date. Everything routine flows through untouched, and every change is recorded against the order.
Baseline to capture first
Order lines per day, staff hours spent on entry, first-time-right rate, and credits traced to order errors.
Measure that should move
First-pass clean order rate, and hours per hundred lines. Both fall out of the system without extra reporting effort.
Common delay
Customer price agreements living in individual reps' heads or spreadsheets. Getting them into a structured price file is step one.
The margin-recovery rollout
Typical starting point: revenue is growing but margin is not. Nobody can say exactly which accounts or categories are eroding it.
Commercial or sales director, finance, purchasing (because cost drives price)
Cost basis, price precedence rules, customer agreements, freight and surcharge policy, margin floors
Fast to begin — the first output is a list of lines currently priced below your own floor
What changes on the commercial desk
Pricing stops being an act of interpretation. Every quote and order is calculated from the same precedence rules, so the conversation moves from "why is this price different?" to "should we agree a different floor for this account?" The first deliverable is usually uncomfortable and useful in equal measure: the list of customers and lines where margin has quietly leaked.
Baseline to capture first
Gross margin by account and category, freight recovered as a share of freight cost, and the count of below-floor lines in the last quarter.
Measure that should move
Gross margin percentage on the accounts reviewed, and the number of price files older than their last cost change.
Common delay
Deciding whose job it is to have the difficult conversation with a long-standing customer. The data is the easy part.
The multi-branch rollout
Typical starting point: three to twenty locations, each buying and pricing with its own habits, and head office unable to answer a company-level stock question without a phone round.
Operations director, branch managers, purchasing, finance
Location hierarchy, transfer rules, company pricing baseline, branch-level stocking policy
Rolled out branch by branch; the first branch is always the slowest and the third is routine
What changes at company level
The network becomes visible as one business rather than a set of independent shops. Stock in the wrong location becomes a transfer decision instead of a purchase order. Buying consolidates where it should and stays local where it must. Branch performance can finally be compared fairly, with demand and lead-time differences accounted for rather than argued about.
Baseline to capture first
Total network stock value, inter-branch transfers per month, and the number of SKUs stocked in more than one location with low local demand.
Measure that should move
Network stock value against service level — released cash without a service decline is the outcome that matters.
Common delay
Branch autonomy. Agreeing which decisions are central and which stay local is a governance question, and it always takes longer than the configuration.
The post-acquisition consolidation
Typical starting point: two businesses, two catalogues, overlapping customers and a spreadsheet doing the work of a merger.
Integration lead, purchasing, finance, both operational teams
Both catalogues loaded side by side, duplicate detection, price and cost comparison
Scoping and matching dominates; the platform work itself is comparatively quick
What changes after the merger
You get a rationalisation plan instead of a merge project. Duplicate items are identified by manufacturer part number and description, overlapping customers are surfaced with both sets of terms, and the combined buying power is quantified on the lines where it genuinely applies. Consolidation happens category by category, with the impact visible before you commit.
Baseline to capture first
SKU overlap between catalogues, shared customers, and the price each business currently gives them.
Measure that should move
Duplicate SKU count and combined stock value in overlapping categories.
Common delay
Data quality in the acquired business — inconsistent part numbers and descriptions are the norm, not the exception.
What the first ninety days look like.
Every rollout has a named owner on both sides. Nothing here happens to your team; it happens with them.
Scoping and baseline
We map the current process, agree which workflow goes first, and record the numbers you are starting from: service level, stock value, order accuracy, margin. Nothing is configured until both sides agree on what success means.
Data and connections
Items, customers, suppliers and locations are loaded or synced, then reconciled line by line against the source system. Integration paths — EDI, e-commerce, accounting, WMS — are built and tested in a sandbox first.
Rules and thresholds
Your service targets, reorder logic, pricing precedence, approval limits and substitution policy are configured and reviewed with the people who will live with them. This is the stage where operational knowledge is written down, often for the first time.
Parallel running
The first workflow runs alongside your existing process. Outputs are compared, differences explained, and adjustments made until the two agree — or until you decide the new answer is the better one.
Cutover and training
Role-based training on your own catalogue and history, not a generic demo dataset. The old process is retired deliberately, with a documented fallback for the first weeks.
Review and widen
A structured review against the baseline, then a decision about the next workflow. Rolls widen when the previous one is stable, never on a fixed schedule that ignores reality.
How we measure a rollout — and how you should.
Every measure below is defined, calculable from your own data, and agreed before implementation starts.
| Measure | Definition | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Service level | Order lines delivered complete and on the promised date, as a share of all lines promised | Sales orders, delivery confirmations |
| Fill rate | Order lines shipped from stock on first attempt, before substitutions or backorders | Allocation and picking records |
| Stock value at cost | Total inventory valuation excluding inbound goods not yet received | Inventory ledger |
| Aged stock | Stock with no consumption in 180 days, measured at cost | Item movement history |
| Gross margin | Revenue less cost of goods and applied freight, before overheads | Order lines, pricing records |
| First-pass order rate | Orders entering the queue that need no human intervention before fulfilment | Order queue events |
| Emergency purchases | Purchase orders raised outside the normal replenishment cycle to avoid a stockout | Purchase order flags, freight cost |
| Supplier on-time receipt | Purchase order lines received on or before the confirmed date | Receipts against purchase orders |
| Below-floor lines | Order lines priced under the margin floor agreed for that account or category | Pricing engine exceptions |
What we will not do
We will not quote a percentage improvement before we have seen your data, and we will not present an aggregate savings figure that cannot be traced to a calculation. If a number appears in a proposal, it comes with its source and its assumptions.
What a realistic first review looks like
At the ninety-day review, expect to discuss which measures moved, which did not, what the team stopped doing, and where the next constraint is. Sometimes the honest conclusion is that a process was already good and the win is different from the one expected.
What we are told in the room, unattributed.
These are the sentences we hear most often during evaluation workshops. We are not going to dress them up as endorsements.
"The problem is not that we do not know what to buy. It is that working it out takes two days."
How purchasing teams describe the weekly replenishment cycle
"Every price in this business is right. It is just that no two of them are right in the same way."
How commercial leads describe pricing inconsistency
"We find out about a short pick when the customer calls, which is about two hours too late."
How warehouse supervisors describe exception handling
"My ERP can tell me what happened. It cannot tell me what to do next."
How operations managers describe the gap Wholara fills
"We are not short of staff. We are short of staff doing work that needs a person."
How owners describe the headcount constraint
"If I add another branch with the way we work today, I need three more office staff."
How multi-branch operators describe the scaling limit
Every quote on this page is a summary of a problem statement we hear repeatedly in evaluation conversations. None of them is attributed to a person or a company, and none should be read as an endorsement.
Bring your numbers, not a wish list.
The most productive demos start with a real problem and a real baseline. We will show you exactly what changes and how it gets measured.
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