Industries
81% of Dutch wholesalers with ten or more staff run an ERP. 39% can take an order through a website or app.
How it works today
Your ERP already holds every customer's discount group, every volume staffel and exactly how much free stock sits in each branch. Your customers see none of it, so they phone the binnendienst and somebody retypes the order line by line. That ERP was bought to run the company, never to be read by the people buying from it.
An email or a PDF lands. The order desk finds the account, looks up each artikelnummer, checks the discount group and the staffel, checks free stock, and types the sales order into the ERP line by line. Then the next one. It survives because it works, and because the customers who order this way are often the most loyal. CBS: 53 percent of wholesalers this size take no order digitally at all.
Pricing lives in the ERP as discount groups, staffels, project prices and standing prijsafspraken. The customer sees a list price at best, so they phone to ask what it costs at their conditions, or find out on the invoice. Nettoprijs here means after this customer's discount, not excluding VAT, and confusing the two means a credit note afterwards. Meanwhile the order desk sits on the phone reading out a price the ERP already holds.
The manufacturer's artikeldata sits ETIM-classified in the datapool. The handelsdata beside it, prices, pack sizes and stock availability, is yours to maintain, and 2BA holds the wholesaler responsible for its quality and currency. In practice one assortimentsmanager keeps it current alongside the day job, with an Excel as glue. Deliver poor ETIM data and you are simply absent from the calculation software your customers use to price jobs. Those are orders you never see.
Picked, backordered or on the truck: the customer cannot see it, so they call. The order desk opens the ERP, maybe the WMS, maybe the carrier's site, and reads it back. The data exists in three systems and no single screen holds it, least of all one the customer can reach. Backorders get chased from a list somebody printed that morning.
What we build for this sector
Not a menu of products. These are the pieces that tend to pay for themselves first in this line of work.
A fitter on site orders inside the budget his werkvoorbereider set, and the werkvoorbereider approves before the order reaches the ERP. That is the part most B2B webshops skip. Around it: prices and staffelkortingen read live from the ERP rather than from a copy, saved bestellijsten per account, ordering by the customer's own article number, customer-specific assortments, free stock per branch, backorder status, packing slip and invoice download. If you already have a webshop nobody uses, the cause is usually one of those couplings.
Part of B2B Ordering PortalsThe Exact Online REST API with SalesOrder, Items, StockPositions, SalesPriceLists and Accounts. Business Central API v2.0 with its published OpenAPI spec. The 2BA JSON REST webservices, GS1 Data Source and EZ-base for artikeldata. DICO transaction messages over Messageservice 3.1 for the customers who already work that way, and Peppol or Digipoort for e-invoicing.
Part of System Integrations & APIsYour suppliers' ETIM-classified artikeldata and your own handelsdata stop living in two systems, maintained in the place the classification already sits. Publishing to 2BA or GS1 Data Source runs through ETIM xChange or BMEcat rather than SALES005, which 2BA itself no longer develops. And while the model is open, add the fields you need anyway: packaging weight per artikel, material class, country of origin.
Part of Data Platforms & PipelinesPurchase advice per supplier, minimum and maximum with a seasonal pattern, dead stock flagged, ABC analysis, and a free-stock figure per warehouse that is actually true in the portal. Honestly: Slim4 and Optiply are mature and often the better buy. We build the glue towards them, or the piece your ERP cannot feed them.
Part of Inventory & Order ManagementFor the customers who will never log in. The PDF or Excel is read out of the mailbox, the customer's own article numbers are matched to yours, pack size and free stock are checked, the correct nettoprijs is pulled from the ERP, and a sales order sits ready for the desk to approve in one click. No order goes in unseen.
Part of Business Process AutomationWhich accounts get a rep's time is a margin decision, and most wholesalers can only estimate that margin. So: margin per customer, per product group and per branch, the accounts that are quietly shrinking, backorder lines per day, stock turns and dead stock. Credit notes split by cause too, the most direct meter there is of a broken order process.
Part of Dashboards & Business IntelligenceSystems we connect to
An ordering portal is nothing more than its couplings. Nearly always the same four: the ERP for customers, prices, stock and sales orders, a datapool for artikeldata and images, the WMS for status, and EDI for the few customers ready for it. Only 19 percent of Dutch wholesalers sell through EDI, so it is a channel, not a foundation.
This is not an exhaustive list, and we are not a reseller for any of it. If a system has an API, a database, or an export, we can usually work with it. If it does not, we will tell you that before you spend anything.
Rules you work under
Verpact wants packaging weight per artikel. CBAM wants embedded emissions per shipment. EUDR wants plot data. GPSR wants a traceable line from supplier to buyer. Once those fields sit in the artikelstam and the order history, each one is a report. Until they do, each one is a spreadsheet and a phone call to a supplier.
What changes
Today
Around 260 orders a day. Two large accounts send EDI. Everybody else emails, phones or walks up to the counter. A binnendienst medewerker opens a PDF from a fitter with eight lines written in the customer's own article numbers, looks each one up, checks the discount group and staffel, checks free stock in the other branch, types the sales order and mails an order confirmation back. Call it seven minutes. The rest of the day is what does it cost and is it gone yet.
After
An ordering portal reading Exact Globe live: customer-specific prices and staffels straight from the ERP, ordering by the customer's own article number through a mapping table they maintain themselves, free stock in both branches, and roles so a fitter orders inside a budget and the werkvoorbereider approves. Product content and images come from 2BA over the JSON REST webservices. A second component reads the emailed PDF orders and stages a sales order.
The result
Repeat ordering moves off the phone. The order desk stops typing and starts calling the accounts that have gone quiet. The two EDI customers notice nothing, which is the point: the portal is for the other 848.
An illustrative scenario based on how work in this sector is typically organised, not a specific client.
Questions from this sector
Usually true, which is why the portal holds no prices of its own. It asks the ERP at the moment of display, through the documented API. Discount groups, staffels, project and contract prices, per-customer nettoprijzen: if it is right in Exact or Business Central it is right in the portal, and if it changes tonight it changes overnight. A webshop with its own price table is wrong within a week, so we do not build one.
Exact publishes a REST API under /api/v1/ with SalesOrder, Logistics/Items, Inventory/StockPositions, Sales/SalesPriceLists and CRM/Accounts among others. Business Central has API v2.0 with a published OpenAPI spec, OData and custom API pages in AL. Where a system genuinely has no API there is nearly always a documented import or export route, or a read replica of the database. The question is never whether it can be coupled, but what the coupling costs and who owns it afterwards.
They do, and that is exactly why we build this. The calls that disappear are the ones nobody wants: what does it cost at our conditions, is it gone yet, can you resend that invoice. The calls that stay are the ones that sell. The portal takes away the retyping, not the customer. And the repeat order lines that currently interrupt the desk were never a conversation worth having.
A Dutch wholesaler keeps about 4.08 cents of operating profit per euro of turnover (CBS, 2024), so do not measure this against turnover. Measure it against the wage bill on the order desk. Personnel costs run at 6.6 percent of turnover in SBI 46, larger than the profit line. And with 31.1 percent of wholesalers reporting a staff shortage in early 2026, the alternative to automating an hour is usually not hiring somebody, it is leaving the work undone. We phase it, and your ERP stays where it is.
Related sectors
Logistics & Transport
We build beside your TMS, not over it: koppelingen, cost per rit including the vrachtwagenheffing, a chauffeursapp that needs no training, and a portal that stops the status calls.
Manufacturing
Between your ERP and the shop floor: digital job tickets, machine data, nacalculatie per order. Hours that are in Ridder iQ, Isah or MKG the same day, and a margin per order the DGA sees for the first time.
Retail & E-commerce
We build the layer behind your platform: stock that holds across store, webshop and bol, product data that flows to every channel, and returns back on stock the same day.
Describe how the work flows now, including the parts held together by spreadsheets. We will tell you what is worth building and what is not.
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