The Practice: who does the work and how engagements run

the builds

The wall was not the platform.

The price file carried years of overrides nobody had sorted into rules or leakage, and each go-live reached choices nobody had been asked to make.

I spent years on the business side of ERP, CPQ, ecommerce, and portal builds at mid-market manufacturers and distributors, deciding what the business would commit to before the system could carry it: which prices, which terms, which exceptions. Davello & Co. is how I take on advisory, interim, and project work.

Each build reached a point where the system needed an answer the business had never settled: which price an account should get when the order fell outside the price file, whether a freight exception still held, or who could override availability.

The price file was only part of the truth. Beside it sat accumulated overrides, side spreadsheets, and order notes. Supplier dates stayed in the record long after buyers had stopped trusting them. Acquired businesses carried the same products under item numbers the central system had never mapped. Reps quoted configured products for short runs with the setup charge waived, and nothing in the price file showed it.

The wall appeared when the system was asked to know that one customer always ships complete, another gets freight waived after a certain order size, a third has a lead-time promise sales keeps honoring, and a fourth receives a packaging treatment that reaches the warehouse only as a note on the pick ticket.

The platform could enforce the terms. It could not decide them.

The work was to settle those choices with management and put each account’s terms where the next rep, warehouse lead, billing clerk, and collector could find them. A freight waiver needed an account rule; ship-complete needed to reach order release; the quoted lead time needed to match the supply rule the planner actually used.

On those builds, the go-live did not move, and orders kept coming in while the answers were settled.

An acquisition, a new site, or an owner’s plan sets up the same collision: decisions the business has never made, a date that will not wait for them, and an order book that cannot stop.

the fit

The order has to carry more than the part number.

Contract prices, supplier constraints, and customer instructions travel with every item, whether it ships from a plant, a master distributor, or a wholesaler.

I work with private, mid-market manufacturers, master distributors, and wholesale suppliers that sell to recurring B2B accounts. Most carry deep catalogs and capital tied up in inventory, quote against supplier and production lead times that move underneath them, and reach customers through reps, distributors, portals, EDI, and direct accounts.

A fastener or fluid-power distributor may carry a six-figure SKU base. A building-products wholesaler sells through buying-group programs and earns manufacturer rebates that settle months after the invoice clears. For a manufacturer selling through distribution, customer prices, protection periods, and special-pricing claims have to agree with what its distributors were offered. On regulated lines, a shipment needs the right lot, certificate, or traceability record before the customer’s dock can accept it.

The item is the same on every shelf. The price, the approved substitute, and the paperwork change with the account.

The customer buys a price that survives the invoice, a delivery date operations can protect, packaging its receiving dock will accept, and an invoice its AP platform will clear on terms.

My work runs along that path: pricing, order release, stocking, billing, and collection. At a manufacturer, it extends from the configured quote and the promised date to finished-goods allocation and the distributor’s special-pricing claim; the plant floor itself stays with operations, which has a say in what sales can promise.

the bench

I lead every engagement myself, and bring in specialists for the questions that need them.

The record, the exception, and what it cost are read by one person. Senior practitioners take defined pieces of the work and answer to that person.

I read the records and sit in the conversations the decisions depend on. In one account, a price exception granted to keep it, a supplier date planning pads to protect its deliveries, and a credit issued weeks later when an invoice missed the exception look like three local problems.

Read together, they are one rule the business never decided.

The person who reads the records is the one who asks the CSR and the buyer what they mean, and the one who later puts the choice in front of management. I do all three. Nothing is handed along a chain of people on the way up, so nothing is simplified in transit. When the controller asks where a number came from, the answer is an order line, and the person who found it is in the room.

When part of the work needs deeper expertise, I bring in senior practitioners I have worked with before, each for a defined question: reading replenishment logic with the buyer, testing the item and customer mappings, examining the constraint inside a warehouse. Their findings come back to the commercial decision the business has to make, and the accountability stays with me.

Each of them works to a question agreed with management before they start. They report to me, so the company’s teams answer one set of questions and act on one set of findings, and the people running this week’s orders are not interviewed twice about the same account.

I do not staff analysts to sample the records; code and AI tools read them in full. Where records are missing or do not match, I say so. Code matches customer part numbers against the item master; AI reads years of order notes, credit memo reasons, and the terms buried in customer agreements. Every finding is checked against the source record before it reaches the people who handled the orders.

The reading ends in a short list of decisions, not a report on the data: each with the orders behind it and what it would cost to keep, price, or stop. By the time it reaches management, the people who handled those orders have explained what the records alone could not.

the engagement

Scope, authority, and what counts as done are agreed before the work begins.

The close, the cutover, the opening, or the plan target sets the boundary and the date the decisions must hold by. Handover follows once they do.

An engagement begins with a date already on the calendar, and with the decisions still standing between that date and the first clean order.

The work takes one of three forms. In advisory work, I establish with management what the change requires and which decisions it forces, and the company’s own people carry it out. Under an interim mandate, I carry it out myself. On a defined project, I take a bounded part of it alongside the leader who owns the wider change.

Management and I first agree on the result, the decision rights, the resources, the conditions for calling it done, and the manager who will inherit the work. I work directly with leadership, with the teams who price, source, stock, ship, bill, and collect, and with IT, because the decisions reach both the order flow and the systems that run it.

Inside an interim or project mandate, I make the calls it covers. Anything outside it goes to management as a trade-off, priced in margin, cash, and customer terms, and they decide.

The ERP partner and the people who own the records make the system changes. Under an interim or project mandate, I make sure what they build is what was decided, and that it holds in live use, difficult cases included, over a period agreed before the work starts.

The work is proved three ways, and none stands in for another: the rule holds on routine orders; the corrections, overrides, and credit memos the work set out to reduce fall below the baseline; and the ledger shows the margin or the cash. Each is measured in its own records. Gains that take longer go to a named owner with a date to measure them.

The handover goes to a named manager with the records, the decision rights, and the backing to keep them current. I stay until the rules hold in daily use and nothing routine depends on me, within that period; if they do not hold by then, management decides whether to extend, revise, or stop. Advisory work ends sooner, when the decisions are settled, specific enough to act on, and each has an owner.

the move

The account record carries only part of what the next site needs.

The approved manufacturer, the shutdown window, and the waived freight had run for years on the old desk’s practice; the new building started without any of them.

A distributor opened a second distribution center to reach its plant accounts overnight, and one long-standing account moved in the first wave.

At the old warehouse, the account’s orders had run the same way for years. Because the plant’s critical bearing came from one approved manufacturer, the order desk never offered the catalog substitute. Orders placed ahead of a maintenance shutdown shipped complete or held, because a partial kit was no use to a crew with a window to hit. The supplier’s lead time in the item record had been wrong for months, so the warehouse kept extra on the shelf and pulled from another warehouse when it ran low. Freight was waived, so the freight line came off every order before release.

None of it was on the customer record. It was in order notes, the CSR’s emails, and a transfer history no one had read as a pattern.

The first order to reach the new site came eleven days before the plant’s shutdown, and the pick ticket printed short on the bearing. The record said nothing about shipping complete, so the in-stock lines went out that afternoon and the bearing went on backorder. When the plant called for its parts, the CSR at the new site did what the item record allowed and shipped the listed substitute two days later. The plant’s receiving dock turned it away: wrong manufacturer. The approved bearing arrived after the shutdown had started.

The invoices followed the record too. No waiver was on the account, so both shipments billed standard freight, and the customer paid for the goods and deducted the freight.

Every step followed the record.

Before a move like this, I follow the last several orders through the people and records that touched them: the quote, the customer file, the item cross-reference, the transfers, the supplier record, the shipments, the invoices, and the credit memos.

Some of what turns up is a requirement. The approved manufacturer and the shutdown rule go into the new site’s account instructions and stocking plan before the first pick, and the catalog substitute comes off that account.

The freight waiver is a different kind of decision. It goes to management with the carrier bills beside it: keep it, price it into the account terms, or end it. Whichever they choose, the effective date is agreed with the plant before the invoice changes.

The supplier dates go to purchasing. Read against actual receipts, they show what the new site needs: a lead-time field someone maintains, a different replenishment rule, more buying capacity, or stock held on purpose ahead of the shutdowns.

The next order for that account finds its terms in the account record, not in an order note.

the first conversation

One conversation is usually enough to see whether there is work worth doing.

It starts with what is not working. Scope comes after that, once both sides know what would have to change.

Write to consult@davelloandco.com. It reaches me directly. If there is work to do, the scope is agreed together before anything else.