Industrial distribution
Case study
A distributor losing days to disconnected tools, and the system that closed the gap.
Metropolitan Technologies ran a growing distribution business on email, spreadsheets, and memory. The audit found where that was quietly costing them. Then we built the fix.
Metropolitan Technologies
The result
9 hours
of duplicated work removed every week, measured across Metropolitan's operations team over the first three months on the new system.
What we walked into
Metropolitan came to us the way most of our clients do: nothing was obviously broken, but the owner could feel the business getting heavier to run. Sales orders moved through email threads and a chain of spreadsheets. Quotes waited on whoever held the vendor pricing. Customer history lived in people's heads. There was no clean system to mine, so we ran the audit the way we always do, structured interviews with the people who actually do the work, context first, then numbers.
What the audit found
The audit walks every process and asks four questions: where is time sitting, where are people doing what software should, where is work done twice, and where is money slipping out.
Time leak
Quotes sat idle waiting on vendor pricing, often for days, before anyone could get back to a customer.
Manual work leak
Every sales order was re-keyed by hand out of the email it arrived in and into the spreadsheet that tracked it.
Rework leak
Orders were regularly redone after errors that traced back to information copied between disconnected tools.
Money leak
Slow quote turnaround was losing deals to competitors who simply answered first.
What we built
The ranked findings pointed at one fix, not fifty. We built a connected operations workspace, so email, calendar, contacts, financials, and documents lived in one place the team actually worked in. Sales orders stopped being re-keyed. Quote turnaround stopped depending on who had which spreadsheet open.
Where it landed
Metropolitan now runs sales orders through one system instead of four. The owner stopped being the integration layer between tools, and the team stopped redoing work that disconnected software had quietly created.
Every engagement starts the same way: we find where the money is leaking.
Confidential. No obligation.