Your product is a specification, not a SKU.
You do not make it and you do not stock it. A customer describes something, you spec it, you shop it to vendors who can actually build it, you mark it up, and you coordinate it into existence. Packaging, promotional products, print, contract packaging, private-label, store fixtures. Different vocabulary, identical machinery. And almost nothing off the shelf is built for it.
Sound familiar?
The RFQ cycle lives in your inbox
Three vendors quoted, two replied, one changed their price on the phone. The comparison exists in somebody's head or a spreadsheet they built this morning, and when the customer asks a week later, it gets rebuilt.
Repeat work is as slow as new work
Most of what you do is a rerun with different numbers. If quoting it again means copying the last one and deleting forty lines by hand, you are paying full price for work the system should already know how to do.
Margin is visible to people who should not see it
When the margin is the product, cost has to be hidden from most of your own staff. Hiding a column in the interface is not the same as protecting it, and everybody who has tried it knows that.
Nothing exists between a spreadsheet and an enterprise suite
The big CRM platforms are priced per seat for sales organisations many times your size, you would use a fraction of what they do, and you would still be bending your process to fit theirs. That is a wide, badly served gap.
Your vendor knowledge is not written down
Who can run that flute, who has that tooling, who ships to Canada without a fuss. That knowledge is worth real money and it usually lives in two people's memory.
What we build for sourcing & brokerage
Inquiry to quote, in one thread
The whole cycle in one place: inquiry, RFQ out to vendors, pricing back, comparison, customer quote, order. Nothing gets rebuilt because nothing got lost.
Vendor capability search
Your capability vocabulary as searchable data rather than institutional memory. Who can make this, at this size, in this material, by this date.
Cost and margin, locked at the database
Role-gated visibility enforced in the database itself, not hidden in the interface. A salesperson sees the quantity being quoted and genuinely cannot see what it costs you.
Repeat orders that behave like repeat orders
Duplicate a job, pick the lines you want, set the new quantities, done. The system anticipates the rerun because the rerun is most of the business.
Releases, shipments and vendor-to-vendor freight
Blanket orders drawn down over months, shipments that never touch your building, freight riding on the tooling line. Modelled properly rather than worked around.
Proof from your world
Two promises the software industry hates making
One monthly fee, starting at launch
Design, development, hosting, and support in one number you can budget like rent. No hourly meters, no change-order invoices, and no per-seat fees that grow with your team. Billing does not begin until version 1.0 is live and your team is using it.
See the plans →You own the custom code. All of it.
The repository, the documentation, and the infrastructure are in your name from day one. If you ever leave us, you take everything and any developer can pick it up. No ransom, no rebuild, no being trapped in someone else's platform.
How we work →Questions we hear from sourcing & brokerage
How do we know whether this actually fits us?
One question sorts it. When a customer asks you for a price, do you have to go and ask someone else first? If yes, this is your shape. If you quote from a price list you control, it is not, and you want inventory and ecommerce software instead. A second tell: if you hide cost from some of your own staff, the hardest part of this is something we have already built.
We looked at the big CRM platforms. Why would custom be cheaper?
Usually because you would be licensing a platform built for a sales organisation many times your size, per seat, and using a small slice of it. The honest test is what you actually touch. If it is quoting, vendor comparison, margin and coordination, that is a build rather than a migration project, and the monthly cost stops scaling with headcount.
Our process is genuinely strange. Is that a problem?
It is usually the reason to build. Vendor-to-vendor shipping, freight on the tooling line, capability vocabularies decades in the making. Packaged systems flatten exactly those things, and they tend to be where your margin actually comes from.
Can we keep our job numbers and our vocabulary?
Yes, and we would push for it. Carrying the existing numbering, terminology and workflow across is what turns a replacement into a faster version of a familiar system rather than a retraining project. We have done precisely this for a broker running on a system built in 2003.
What if we manufacture some of it ourselves?
Then part of what you need is shop-floor routing and scheduling, which is a different kind of system and not what this is. We will say so. The sourcing and quoting half still fits; the production half is a manufacturing execution system and we would rather point you at one than pretend otherwise.
Tell us what's slowing your business down.
In a free one-hour call we map what the platform needs to do and tell you which tier it lands in. Within two business days you have a written plan and a monthly number. No proposal theater, no pressure.
One monthly fee · Built, hosted & improving · You own the custom code