One dashboard for SLA firefighting and distributor quoting

The problem

Two disconnected jobs ran the business day to day. SLA risk was buried in the help desk's own reporting, so nobody had one ranked view of what was about to breach, which clients were spiking, or whether the day's queue would even fit in the hours available. Resolved tickets with zero hours logged for hourly-billed clients went unnoticed, and billable revenue leaked away every month. On the purchasing side, the distributor had no browsable catalog or product search of any kind, only a daily price-and-availability feed, so every quote meant hunting by hand for the cheapest price type the firm was entitled to, checking margin by hand, and hoping nobody had priced it under the manufacturer's minimum.

What we built

We built one platform that runs both jobs. The help-desk half pulls tickets into a live board ranked worst-first by SLA risk, with alerts when a breach is close, per-client volume spikes, and a same-day capacity forecast, plus a wallboard mode for office screens. It also handles ticket claiming, a 0-100 agent performance score across resolution rate, first-response speed and SLA adherence, a monthly review deck exported straight to PowerPoint, an Unbilled screen that shows resolved work with no hours logged for hourly clients, and CSV exports whenever they're needed. The purchasing half builds its own catalog from the distributor's daily feed and purchase history, so staff can search parts, check every price type for the cheapest rate they're entitled to, work out a sell price for a target margin, flag anything under MAP, and print a quote in the company's own house style. Quotes move through draft, sent, accepted or declined, with chase reminders, and can link back to the ticket that prompted them, and a deal radar compares catalog scans to flag price drops and cost increases automatically. An optional AI feature writes commentary on the numbers, but it never does the math. Every calculation is done by ordinary code with fixed rules, and the AI only comments on results that have already been worked out.

The outcome

A ticket stops looking neglected the moment a quote goes out against it, so the two halves of the job now help each other instead of living in separate tools. What's about to breach SLA went from something someone had to go dig for to something visible on a wallboard, and the Unbilled screen turned hours nobody noticed into something someone really checks. On purchasing, margin protection and MAP compliance stopped depending on someone remembering to check by hand, and the deal radar catches distributor price moves the team would otherwise only notice after the fact. The same pattern, billing for time under SLA and reselling hardware at a protected margin, fits any business shaped that way: VARs and hardware resellers, AV/telecom/security integrators, copier dealers and other field-service outfits billing hourly, and internal IT departments buying their own hardware.