Organization name
EveryWorks Supply
Organization type or industry
Regional B2B distributor of janitorial, safety, packaging, and facility maintenance supplies to commercial and institutional accounts
Approximate size (optional)
About 90 employees across three branches, around $32.4M annual revenue
Problems and opportunities
Roughly 55% of our orders are typed into the ERP by hand. About 46% arrive by email — some as a PDF or spreadsheet attachment, some typed into the body of the message, some as "the usual, plus two cases of the blue gloves" — and another 9% come by phone. The portal and EDI orders, about 40% between them, land in the ERP on their own and cause us almost no trouble. A spot check last quarter found errors on about 2% of the orders we key by hand, usually the wrong item where the customer used their own part number, or the wrong ship-to on a multi-site account.
Our two shared mailboxes take about 450 emails a day. A large share are the same few requests — where is my order, can I have a copy of that invoice, can you send proof of delivery, I need the safety data sheet for this product. There is no case system, so nothing is assigned and nothing is measured beyond a sample we did by hand: median first response 3.4 hours, with the worst tenth over a full business day. Quotes take a median of 1.5 business days when we want them same day.
Every morning somebody rebuilds an open-order exception list in Excel from three ERP exports so we can see which orders are stuck on credit hold, on backorder, or waiting on a price. Supplier price files arrive from about 30 suppliers in about 30 formats and are keyed in by hand. Tracking numbers are pasted from the shipping software back into the ERP. The monthly KPI pack takes the Controller about two days.
Several things are also just inconsistent between branches. West came to us in 2021 and still does returns differently.
Primary products or services
We stock and distribute janitorial chemicals and dilution systems, paper and hygiene products with the dispensers that go with them, safety supplies and PPE, packaging and shipping supplies, floor care equipment with its parts and consumables, matting, foodservice disposables, and a small MRO consumables range.
About 14,000 SKUs are active, meaning sold at least once in the last twelve months. Roughly 62% of those we stock; the other 38% are special order or direct ship from the supplier.
Customers are contract janitorial and facilities-services companies, K-12 districts and municipal buildings, healthcare and long-term care facilities, light manufacturing and warehousing, and property management companies. Almost all of it is account-based repeat purchasing on credit terms against contract pricing, not one-off transactions. Healthcare accounts will not accept a substituted product without agreeing to it first, and several of them require documentation we have to be able to produce on request.
Major processes
Order to cash: an order arrives on one of five channels, is entered or received into the ERP, is checked for price and credit, is picked and shipped or set up as a special order, is invoiced, and is collected.
Quote to order for anything not on contract pricing.
Purchasing and replenishment: a buyer works from a reorder workbook built out of a daily ERP export, raises purchase orders, chases confirmations, and receives against them.
Customer service: order status, proof of delivery, invoice copies, safety data sheets, complaints, and returns, all of it running through two shared mailboxes.
Returns and credits, which start with an RMA number, except at West.
Month end: invoice runs, statements, and a management KPI pack.
Current technology
A mid-market ERP, about eleven years old and hosted, which is our system of record for customers, items, pricing, orders, purchase orders, inventory and invoices. Its reporting is rigid and mostly ends in a CSV export, and its API is read-mostly and not well documented.
A CRM used by the outside sales team, though not consistently, and not linked to the ERP customer master. EDI through a third-party broker for six large accounts. A supplier-provided web portal for customer self-service ordering. Microsoft 365 throughout — Outlook including the shared mailboxes, Excel, SharePoint, Teams. Shipping and freight software at each branch. Handheld scanners for picking at North only; South and West pick from printed tickets.
And a lot of spreadsheets: the purchasing reorder workbook, the daily open-order exception list, the supplier price file staging sheets, and the monthly KPI pack.
IT is two people who spend most of their time on support and ERP administration. We have no developers and nobody who works with data full time.
Current automation or AI
EDI orders from six accounts post into the ERP automatically, and portal orders do the same. That is the extent of it, and those two channels are the ones that give us the least trouble.
There are a few Outlook rules and a scheduled ERP report or two. Nothing else is automated. We do not use AI anywhere today, and we have no policy that says what we would and would not be willing to do with it.
Goals
Quote same day instead of a day and a half. Cut the amount of information we type twice. Reduce the errors that come out of manual order entry, because every one of them costs us a credit, a redelivery, or a customer's patience. See the orders that are stuck without somebody building a spreadsheet at 7am. Grow about 6.5% next year without adding people in inside sales or finance. And get West working the same way as the other two branches.
Constraints or concerns
IT is two people and we have no developers, so anything that needs custom integration work goes to the ERP vendor's professional services and gets expensive quickly. Capital spend over $25,000 needs the President's approval. June through August is our busiest period and the worst time to change anything.
Customer pricing is commercially sensitive and we would not want it leaving our systems. There is customer contact information and some personal guarantor information in the ERP. Healthcare accounts impose documentation requirements on us. Safety data sheets have to be current.
Pricing exceptions, credit limits and credit holds, credits and refunds above a threshold, purchase commitments, and any promise about a delivery date are all approvals that belong to named people, and that is not something we are looking to change. We are not interested in a system that makes commercial decisions on our behalf or that makes it unclear who is accountable when something goes wrong.
Documents used
- EveryWorks-Company-Overview-FY27-Priorities.pdf
- EveryWorks-Order-to-Cash-Operations-v3.pdf
- Customer-Service-Playbook-2026.pdf
- Purchasing_and_Inventory_Process_Notes.pdf
- EveryWorks-IT-Systems-and-Data-Readiness-FY26.pdf