Before the portal, every dealer order arrived the same way it had for years: a phone call or a WhatsApp message to a sales executive, who wrote it down, checked stock by asking someone on the floor, then typed it into the order system by hand. On a busy morning, executives were juggling four or five calls at once, and orders sat in a mental queue until someone got around to entering them.

Tile adds a layer most product categories don't have to deal with. The same SKU can sit across two or three different shade lots at once, and a dealer ordering by phone has no way to specify which lot they actually want, or to know whether the lot they got last time is even still in stock. Pricing made it worse: each dealer sat in a different pricing tier, and active schemes changed by month and sometimes by week. Executives were expected to remember or look up the right price for each dealer, each range, each scheme, on every call. Mistakes went both ways; overcharging upset dealers, undercharging ate into margins that nobody noticed until the monthly reconciliation.

There was no order trail a dealer could check for themselves. If a dealer wanted to know whether an order had been confirmed, which shade lot was allocated, or when it would dispatch, the only option was to call and ask, which put another call into the same queue that was already backed up.

The numbers: average order processing time of roughly 35 minutes from call to confirmed entry, and a sales team spending more of its day on data entry than on actual selling.

Tiles IT Solutions built a dealer-facing ordering portal that moved the order entry work from the sales desk to the dealer's own phone or desktop. Each dealer logs into their own account and sees only their pricing tier, their active schemes, and their live credit balance, applied automatically with no manual lookup.

The catalog was rebuilt with real-time stock visibility tied directly into the warehouse system, down to the shade lot and caliber grade. A dealer placing an order sees exactly which lots are available for a given range right now, not a static price list that may already be out of date. Repeat orders, which made up a large share of dealer activity, got a one-tap reorder option pulled from order history, with the system flagging if the originally ordered lot has since sold out.

On the backend, every order placed through the portal routes straight into the order management system with no re-keying, and lot allocation happens automatically at the point of order rather than being decided later on the warehouse floor. Sales executives shifted from typing orders to handling exceptions: large project orders, credit holds, new dealer onboarding, the work that actually needs a person.

Rollout was staged by region. Each dealer cohort got a short walkthrough session and a printed quick-reference card before going live, and the first two weeks ran portal and phone orders in parallel so the sales team could catch and resolve gaps before the phone channel was retired for routine orders.

Before: A dealer called in, waited for an executive to be free, read out items one by one, and waited again while the executive checked stock and pricing manually before the order was entered. Shade lot was whatever the warehouse happened to allocate. Status updates meant another phone call.

After: A dealer opens the portal, sees live stock by shade lot and their own pricing instantly, taps to reorder a previous order or builds a new one, and gets confirmation in seconds. Order status is visible on screen at every stage, from confirmed to dispatched.

• Order processing time dropped by 72%, from roughly 35 minutes to under 10 per order
• Sales executives saved 3+ hours a day previously lost to manual order entry across the team
• Pricing errors fell sharply once tiered pricing and active schemes applied automatically with no manual lookup
• Repeat orders rose by 38% after dealers started using the one-tap reorder feature
• Status-check phone calls dropped to near zero, with order status visible on screen at every stage

When every order has to pass through a person before it reaches the warehouse, growth is capped by how many calls a sales team can physically take. Moving routine tile ordering onto a self-service portal didn't just save time, it freed the sales team to spend their day on the conversations that actually need a human.