25+
Locations on one platform
Case Study
25+ Locations, One Commercial Platform
How a European B2B Distributor Built Its Commercial Intelligence Platform Over 5+ Years
21-day
Early warning on customer churn
Real-time
Visibility
Visibility
Trends flagged before quarter-end
5+ years
Continuous partnership
The Problem
Fragmented data, fragmented decisions. The hidden cost? Visibility eroded one office at a time.
A European B2B distribution company was losing commercial visibility across 25+ locations because its customer transactions, budget targets, market data, and portal activity lived in four disconnected systems.
The client serves thousands of business customers across the Netherlands and Belgium. Part of a larger European group, the company was later acquired by a private equity firm. Growth through acquisition had created a patchwork of systems and a patchwork of practices. Each office developed its own rhythm, its own spreadsheets, its own way of tracking what mattered.
Normal for a growing distribution business. And quietly expensive.
Customer transactions sat in the ERP. Budget targets lived in spreadsheets. Market data lived in a national professional registry that wasn’t connected to anything. The web portal generated its own activity stream. Each system was useful on its own. None of them spoke to the others.
The questions that should have been easy to answer weren’t. Which customers had gone quiet. Where new business was coming from, and where it was bleeding. How each location stacked up against its targets. What the real market share was in each region. The data existed. It just lived in the wrong places.
In distribution, where margins are tight and customer relationships move fast, that gap costs accounts before anyone realizes they’ve gone quiet.
What We've Built
The results of a 5 years+ partnership.
The client didn’t need a dashboard. The client needed a data foundation that the dashboards could sit on. Tecknoworks built the Multiplier in workstreams, starting with the most painful gap and working outward across the partnership.
One source of truth. All commercial data consolidated into a single cloud-based data warehouse: ERP transactions, budget targets, external market registry data, and web portal activity. The warehouse ran nightly consolidation, so sales leaders opened their dashboards each morning and saw yesterday’s numbers. One version of truth for every customer, location, and metric.
Customer health segmentation. Every customer automatically classified into action-driven categories: active clients, group accounts, new business, at-risk clients (no orders in 60+ days), and prospects. Reps stopped guessing which accounts needed attention. The platform told them.
Retention alerts at 21 days. The platform generated weekly alerts when any customer hadn’t placed an order in 21+ days. Each alert landed on the responsible rep’s desk with full context: last order date, historical spend, budget target. Reps recorded outcomes, creating a closed-loop retention process. Twenty-one days sounds aggressive, but in distribution, twenty-one days is roughly the window where a customer still thinks of you as their supplier. Wait 60 days and you are writing a win-back campaign. Catch it at three weeks and you are making a phone call to someone who still thinks of you as their supplier.
True market penetration. By integrating the national professional registry, the platform calculated actual market share by region. This was the piece nobody had been able to see. Management had always known who their customers were. Now they could see who their customers weren’t.
The platform generated qualified prospect lists for each location based on geographic proximity and potential value. Sales efforts shifted from scattershot to targeted. Location managers could pull up a list of businesses within 15 kilometers that matched their customer profile but had never placed an order.
Role-based dashboards. Location managers saw their customers, their budgets, their retention alerts. Regional directors saw cross-location comparisons and regional trends. The executive team saw company-wide performance, market share, and portfolio health. Every user saw only the data relevant to their role.
What Changed
From quarter-end guesswork to daily visibility across 25+ locations.
From days to seconds. The time to answer “how is location X performing?” went from days of spreadsheet wrangling to a single dashboard. Every customer interaction, every budget target, every market opportunity visible in one place across all 25+ locations.
Proactive retention instead of reactive damage control. Sales teams now receive churn alerts before relationships deteriorate, instead of after. Catching it at 21 days versus discovering it at quarter-end means a phone call versus a lost account.
Real market intelligence. Management could quantify their addressable market for the first time, calculate penetration by region, and pull targeted prospect lists from the national registry. They stopped guessing where to grow.
Daily operational discipline. Budget vs. actual tracking moved to daily granularity, with seasonal patterns recognized per location. When a location is trending behind budget in week 6, the regional director knows about it in week 6, not week 13.
Acquisition-ready infrastructure. The infrastructure was designed for growth through acquisition. When new locations join, they plug into the same framework. The parent group gets immediate visibility into new operations without rebuilding anything.
What's possible now:
The commercial intelligence platform that grows with the portfolio.
Before this engagement, each office was its own commercial island. Its own spreadsheets, its own customer view, its own version of “how things are going.” Headquarters got a composite picture by quarter-end, after the fact.
Now, every level of the organization works from the same commercial foundation. Reps act on 21-day alerts. Location managers track budget vs. actual at daily granularity. Regional directors compare locations on the same KPIs. The executive team sees company-wide market share, portfolio health, and acquisition impact in real time.
The Multiplier became the framework the parent group uses for buy-and-build. New acquisitions plug in instead of creating another silo. For PE-backed companies running an acquisition strategy, that’s the gap between acquiring revenue and acquiring a commercial operation you can actually manage.
How We Built It
A foundation that absorbs new locations instead of rebuilding for them.
Cloud-based data warehouse
Nightly consolidation across ERP, budget spreadsheets, web portal activity, and the national professional registry.
Health segmentation
Automated customer health segmentation with five action-driven categories
Retention alert engine
Weekly 21-day retention alert engine with full context delivered to the responsible rep, closed-loop outcome recording
National professional registry integration
True market penetration analysis and geographically-targeted prospect lists (15 km radius matching).
Interactive role-based dashboards
Tailored views for location managers, regional directors, and executives.
Budget tracking
Daily budget-versus-actual visibility by location, seasonality, and portfolio.
The Bigger Picture
Relevance beyond distribution
This pattern repeats across any multi-location, multi-system business. Growth through acquisition creates data fragmentation. Data fragmentation kills commercial visibility. Without visibility, retention drops, market share calls become guesswork, and performance management across a distributed operation degrades quietly.
The fix is a data foundation that connects what’s already there (ERP, spreadsheets, external registries, portals) into something every level of the organization can actually work from. Built incrementally. Value from year one. Designed so new acquisitions plug in instead of creating another silo.
For CEOs and COOs, the Multiplier delivers unified commercial visibility across distributed operations, automated customer retention that catches churn before it happens, and market penetration analysis that turns a national registry into a sales pipeline.
For PE operating partners, it delivers immediate post-acquisition visibility into commercial health, standardized KPIs across a fragmented portfolio, and data infrastructure that supports buy-and-build, where new acquisitions plug into the same platform instead of creating another silo. Retention improvement and market expansion levers that hit EBITDA directly.
Want to see what this looks like for you?
If your commercial data lives in an ERP, spreadsheets, a portal, and an external registry that do not talk to each other, this is the kind of foundation that fixes it.
AI-Driven Data Platform Engineering: we build the data foundation production AI requires, starting with the most painful commercial gap and working outward. Incremental delivery, value from year one, designed to absorb new acquisitions instead of fragmenting under them.
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