Industries · Lubricants Distribution
Orders, tank levels and safety data sheets, without the phone tag.
Your ERP knows the products, the prices and the trucks. Your customers still order by phone and email, tank readings arrive in a separate portal, and the SDS request goes to whoever answers first. We connect those.
A plant manager emails for the SDS on a hydraulic oil you shipped two years ago. Nobody is sure which revision they received.
Lubricant distribution runs on repeat orders from customers who expect you to know what they bought last time. Bulk accounts want a delivery before the tank runs low. Packaged accounts want to reorder without a phone call. Every account wants current safety data sheets and product data sheets, and some want certificates of analysis with each lot.
The data to do all of that already exists in your ERP, your tank monitoring and your supplier files. It is just in three places, and the connection between them is a customer service rep.
Where the software stops
The ERP holds the orders. The rest lives around it.
Distribution ERPs such as ADD Systems, Accolent, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP do the core job well. What they rarely do is face the customer or talk to the tank.
Distribution ERP
No front door for the customer
Repeat orders come in by phone, email and the occasional fax, and a rep keys them in. A customer who wants to see their order history or reorder last month's drums has to ask.
Tank monitoring
Tank readings in one portal, orders in another
Sensors from providers such as SkyBitz or FoxInsights report levels to their own dashboard. Turning a low reading into a scheduled delivery is often still a person watching a screen.
Supplier and OEM documents
SDS and data sheets live in folders
Safety data sheets, product data sheets and OEM approval letters come from the refiner or blender. Keeping the right revision attached to the right product, and sent to the right customer, is manual.
Accounting and pricing
Contract pricing drifts
Customer-specific pricing and base oil surcharges get updated in one place and missed in another, and the gap shows up as a credit memo.
The paperwork
The paperwork a distributor carries.
Chemical products come with documents, and your customers need them to meet their own OSHA hazard communication obligations. That makes the paperwork part of the product.
- Safety data sheets
- The current revision for every product a customer has bought, available on request and ideally before they ask.
- Product data sheets and OEM approvals
- Specification sheets and approval letters that maintenance teams need to justify a product change.
- Certificates of analysis
- Lot-level test results that some industrial accounts require with each shipment.
- Delivery tickets
- Bulk delivery quantities written on a ticket in the truck and re-entered for invoicing.
- Tank and inventory records
- Consignment and customer-owned tank levels reconciled against what was delivered and billed.
How we help
Built around your ERP, not instead of it.
Customer ordering portal
Customers see their products, prices and history, and reorder without a call. Orders post straight to the ERP.
SDS and document library
Current safety and product data sheets linked to each product and to each customer who bought it.
Tank level to delivery
Low readings from your tank monitoring become draft orders or route stops for a dispatcher to approve.
Delivery ticket capture
Delivered quantities recorded once, on the truck, and carried through to the invoice.
Contract pricing checks
Customer price lists compared against what was invoiced so the drift is caught before the customer catches it.
Managed Store
If you sell packaged product online, a Managed Store at $595 a month runs it for you.
Sales and account visibility
Order history, volumes and lapsed accounts in one view for the reps who call on them.
A website you do not maintain
Managed Website plans from $95 a month, with product lines and brand pages kept current.
Automation and custom software work is scoped and delivered for a fixed estimate you approve before we start.
Proof · Pachysandra · the same kind of work
837 orders since 2020. On a platform the owners hold outright.
We have not built for a lubricant distributor. The closest work we have is ordering. Pachysandra runs two stores that have taken orders continuously since 2020 on a platform they own, with no migrations and 22 hours of maintenance across five years.
A customer reorder portal for a distributor is the same idea pointed at repeat industrial buyers instead of consumers.
Go deeper
Running a company's websites and tools without an IT team.
A distributor with an ERP, a tank portal, a website and a shared inbox has four systems and no owner for how they fit. The playbook covers what that costs and where to start.
Lubricants Distribution
Tell us how orders arrive today.
Bring your ERP, your tank monitoring and the inbox where SDS requests land. We will show you what a connected version looks like.
A senior engineer reads it and replies within one business day.
or call +1 (610) 756-5060