12 Hours Saved Per Week — How an Industrial Heating Manufacturer Replaced Phone and Fax Orders with a Self-Service B2B Portal
A US-based manufacturer of custom quartz heating elements, thermocouples, and temperature control hardware replaced phone, fax, and email ordering with Express B2B. The company serves approximately 50 trade accounts, each with unique pricing arrangements — combinations of volume-based, tiered, and fixed pricing per account. After implementing Express B2B, the team recovered 12 hours per week previously spent on manual order entry and pricing lookups, and pricing disputes have been eliminated since launch.
Fifty trade accounts. Fifty different pricing agreements. Every order by phone, fax, or email. A coordinator manually cross-referencing pricing spreadsheets for each one. They fixed it without a single line of custom code.
Custom heating components, complex specifications, and a trade account base that expected to be treated individually
This US-based manufacturer produces custom quartz and tubular heating elements, thermocouples, RTDs, and temperature control hardware — components that go into automotive equipment, home heating systems, consumer goods, and a range of other precision manufacturing applications. Nearly every order is built to specification.
Their trade customer base consists of approximately 50 accounts: engineering and procurement teams at manufacturers who source specialty thermal components on a recurring basis. These aren't one-time buyers — they're long-term accounts with negotiated pricing that reflects volume commitments, product mix, and years of relationship. No two accounts have identical pricing. Some have fixed-price lists for the products they order regularly. Others have volume tiers that kick in at certain quantity thresholds. A handful have pricing structures that combine both — a fixed base rate for standard configurations, with volume discounts layered on top for high-quantity runs.
On the back end, the company runs Infor, an enterprise-grade ERP. Every order, regardless of how it arrived, had to be manually entered by staff before it could move to production.
Every order started with a phone call — and pricing was a spreadsheet problem nobody wanted to solve
With fifty accounts and fifty sets of pricing rules, the ordering process was held together by a small team and a collection of spreadsheets. When a buyer called or emailed with an order, the coordinator needed to identify which account was placing it, pull up that account's pricing reference, manually calculate any applicable volume tiers, and enter the whole thing into Infor by hand. On a good day, this was time-consuming. On a busy day — when several accounts called in the same morning — it was error-prone.
Pricing errors were the chronic problem. Not dramatic ones — the team knew their accounts well — but the kind of small, persistent mistakes that happen when a person is juggling a phone call, a pricing spreadsheet, and an ERP entry simultaneously. An order entered at the wrong tier. A fixed-price item accidentally billed at the catalog rate. A volume threshold applied to the wrong product line. Each one meant a correction, an email, and a dent in the relationship.
The deeper constraint was capacity. The team's order-entry workload was essentially a fixed ceiling on how many trade accounts the business could serve. Adding buyers meant adding headcount — or telling new accounts to expect slower service. Neither was acceptable. The business had demand it couldn't efficiently fulfill, because the bottleneck wasn't sales, it was the manual process behind every order.
Pricing errors
Fifty accounts, fifty pricing structures. Applied manually under volume pressure — wrong tier, wrong rate, wrong product line. Each error meant a correction cycle.
Rep time overhead
Every order required a phone call, an email, or a fax — and then manual entry into Infor. Roughly 12 hours per week in order intake and data entry alone.
No path to scale
Every new trade account added to the order-entry workload. Growing the buyer base meant growing the team — or telling buyers to wait longer.
The pricing complexity that ruled out every generic option
The manufacturer already had a Magento website for their broader product presence. Extending it to serve B2B trade accounts was the obvious first consideration. After evaluating it, they set it aside: Magento B2B's pricing rules are designed for consistent pricing tiers applied across segments of buyers. Their pricing model is the opposite — individually negotiated rules per account, with some accounts on fixed lists, some on volume tiers, and some on combinations that don't fit cleanly into a standard B2B pricing template. Replicating that without custom development would have required workarounds that were harder to maintain than the spreadsheets they were replacing. See how Express B2B compares to Magento for distributors and manufacturers.
What made Express B2B the right fit was that it models pricing at the account level, not the segment level. Each of the 50 trade accounts has its own configuration: the products it can see, the prices it pays, and the pricing logic that applies to it — whether that's a fixed list, a volume-tier schedule, or a combination of both. When a buyer logs in, they see exactly their catalog at exactly their prices. There's no lookup, no calculation, no coordinator in the loop. The system handles what a person was doing manually before.
The second factor was the ordering flow itself. Their buyers are engineers. They know what they want, they're comfortable with specifications, and they don't need hand-holding through a checkout. The two-step flow — select your account, configure and place your order, submit — was direct enough that no training was required. Adoption was fast.
"Every order used to start with a phone call. Now our buyers log in, configure what they need, and submit — we don't touch it until it's ready for production."
— Operations Director, US Industrial Heating Manufacturer
Five weeks — the platform was straightforward, the pricing documentation wasn't
The implementation ran five weeks from kickoff to go-live. The manufacturer didn't need to involve an IT team or a developer — the platform configuration was handled collaboratively with Express B2B. The internal workload was primarily administrative: gathering and formalizing the pricing rules that existed informally across spreadsheets and institutional memory.
That was the hard part. Fifty accounts, each with a pricing arrangement that existed somewhere — a spreadsheet, an email thread, a long-standing verbal agreement. Before any account could be configured in the platform, its rules had to be documented clearly enough to be entered. For most accounts this was straightforward. For a handful with layered volume-plus-fixed pricing, it took a few rounds of clarification to get the rules stated precisely enough to configure correctly. Once they were in, the platform handled them exactly as intended.
Buyer onboarding was the easy part. Accounts received login credentials and a short explanation of the ordering flow. Engineers — the primary buyers — needed no formal training. The two-step checkout was intuitive enough that most placed their first orders without assistance. Within 60 days of go-live, 48 of 50 trade accounts had placed at least one order through the portal.
Formalizing the pricing agreements. Many existed as institutional knowledge — "Account X always gets this rate" — that had never been written down precisely. Translating those into explicit rules took time, but it was work the business needed to do regardless. The platform just forced it.
Buyer adoption. Engineers are self-sufficient — they don't need to be walked through a checkout. The two-step ordering flow required no training, and the feedback was consistent: placing an order through the portal was faster than calling in.
12 hours a week back — and a pricing problem the team had lived with for years, gone
The most immediate change was time. The coordinator who had been processing inbound orders — answering calls, responding to faxes, cross-referencing pricing spreadsheets, entering everything into Infor — recovered roughly 12 hours per week. Those hours were reallocated to account management: following up on orders, supporting new buyers through their first few portal sessions, and handling the exceptions that genuinely needed human attention. The volume of orders didn't decrease. The manual overhead of processing them did.
Pricing errors stopped. Not because the team improved — they were already careful — but because the manual step where errors happened was removed. When a buyer submits an order through the portal, the pricing is already correct: it was configured once, at setup, for that account. There's no lookup, no calculation, no opportunity for a wrong number to make it to the order. In the months since launch, the manufacturer has had no pricing disputes that originated from an order entered through Express B2B.
The business processed approximately $270,000 in orders through the portal in the first 90 days after launch. That volume was consistent with what the business had been handling before — the difference was how it arrived. Orders came in cleanly, at the right price, with the right account information attached. The team's job shifted from processing to managing.
"Every order used to start with a phone call. Now our buyers log in, configure what they need, and submit — we don't touch it until it's ready for production."
Three capabilities that solved the hard problems
Not a feature list — the specific capabilities that this deployment depended on.
Per-account negotiated pricing
Volume-based, tiered, fixed, or any combination — configured per account, not per segment. Each of the 50 trade accounts sees exactly their pricing when they log in, with no lookup or manual calculation required.
Two-step ordering
Select billing account → configure and pick products → submit. Account selection loads the correct catalog, pricing, and ship-to address automatically. Engineers can spec and submit an order in a single session without calling anyone.
Per-account catalog control
Each trade account sees only the products it's authorized to order, at the quantities and configurations relevant to its application. Buyers aren't navigating a full catalog — they're working from a curated view that reflects their relationship.
Questions from manufacturers and distributors with similar trade account structures
Five weeks from kickoff to go-live. The platform configuration itself was not the bottleneck — the time was spent formalizing pricing agreements that had existed informally across spreadsheets and institutional knowledge. Once each account's pricing rules were documented precisely, configuration was straightforward. No custom development was required.
The team recovered approximately 12 hours per week that had been spent on manual order entry and pricing lookups. In the first 90 days after launch, $270,000 in orders were processed through the portal. Pricing errors — a chronic problem when manual lookups under volume pressure applied the wrong rate — have been eliminated since go-live.
Pricing is configured per account, not per segment. Each billing account in Express B2B can carry its own pricing rules — a fixed price list, a volume-tier schedule, or a combination of both applied to different products or order sizes. When a buyer logs in, they see only their prices. There is no lookup or manual calculation at order time.
48 of 50 trade accounts placed at least one order through the portal within the first 60 days. The buyers are engineers — they're comfortable with self-service tools and prefer placing orders independently to calling in. No formal training was provided. Most accounts placed their first portal orders without assistance.
Magento B2B is designed around pricing segments — groups of buyers who share the same rates. This manufacturer's pricing model is individually negotiated per account, with some on fixed lists, some on volume tiers, and some on combinations. Replicating that structure in Magento would have required custom development to maintain. Express B2B models per-account pricing natively, without code.
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