Wholesale, distribution & trading
In distribution the deal usually goes to whoever quotes first and quotes right. Both halves of that are a retrieval problem: the cost sheet, the tier, the stock position, the duty code and the last three quotes to this customer all exist — they are just spread across seven files and two people who are on leave.
Importers, distributors and trading houses
Thousands of SKUs, tiered customer pricing, multi-currency supplier costs and a sales team whose competitive advantage is response time — where a quotation still takes two to three hours because pricing lives in someone's spreadsheet.
You will recognise yourself if
- Quotes that wait for one person to come back from lunch
- Supplier costs in USD, customer prices in MYR, and an exchange rate from last month
- A master pricing file nobody is willing to email
What actually hurts
The quotation bottleneck.
Two to three hours to build a single quote: find the current supplier cost, check the customer tier, confirm stock, apply the bulk break, add duty. By the time it goes out, a faster competitor has already been read.
Margin leaks and currency volatility.
Costs move with the exchange rate; the discount sheet does not. Sales quote from a version that was accurate in March, and the margin erosion is only visible at month end, one order too late.
Fear of the pricing sheet leaking.
The cost basis and discount ladder are the business. Nobody will upload them to an external tool, so the one thing that would make quoting fast is the one thing that is locked in a file share.
What it reads.
The quoting corpus is unusually structured — which is exactly why hybrid retrieval matters here: an SKU is an exact-match problem, a customer question is not.
- Supplier cost sheets and catalogues
- Tiered pricing and discount rules
- Live stock levels and lead times
- Bulk pricing and volume break matrix
- Payment terms and credit rules
- Customs duties and tax codes
- Historical quotations and won/lost outcomes
One question, answered
A representative exchange for this sector. Every figure and instruction is traced back to the document it came from — including the revision and the date it took effect.
Quote for SKU-8812, 500 units, customer is Tier 2. What can I offer?
Landed cost is MYR 41.20/unit at the current supplier rate.1 Tier 2 list is MYR 58.00, and the 500-unit break applies a 7% volume discount, giving MYR 53.94/unit — MYR 26,970 for the order at a 23.6% margin.2 Stock on hand is 640 units, so this ships from inventory.3 Tier 2 payment terms are 30 days net; this customer is MYR 18,400 against a MYR 50,000 limit, so the order clears without escalation.4
Illustration only. This exchange is a written example of how AIMY Expert behaves — not a recording of a live system, and not a claim about any real organisation's data.
What changes, and what we would measure.
The figures below are what a deployment is scoped against, not audited results from your organisation. Each one states its basis, because a number without one is marketing.
One pass
cost, tier, volume break, stock and credit retrieved together
Basis: one query instead of five lookups across five systems
Same day
turnaround becomes the norm rather than the exception
Basis: consequence of removing the assembly step, not a systems change
100%
of quoted lines cite the cost sheet and tier applied
Basis: architectural guarantee — the figure and its source are returned together
What it means for the business
- Win more deals by being the first credible number on the buyer's desk
- Protect margin on every line, because the cost used is the cost that is current
- Pricing logic stays inside your permission boundary, not in a chat history
- Junior sales staff quote at the accuracy of your most experienced person
Where the work usually starts.
Not an exhaustive list — these are the engagements that most reliably clear the value-versus-risk bar in this sector.
Instant quotation assembly
Cost, tier, volume break, stock and credit position retrieved together, each line traced to the sheet it came from.
Margin and discount guardrails
The floor price for this customer and this quantity, stated before the discount is promised rather than after.
Stock and lead-time answers
What is on hand, what is inbound and when — answered without interrupting the warehouse.
Duty, tax and compliance lookup
HS codes, duty rates and documentation requirements retrieved per product and destination.
Designed around the constraints, not despite them.
These requirements shape the architecture from the first design session. Retrofitting them after a successful pilot is the most common reason AI programmes in this sector never reach production.
- Cost basis and rebate terms visible only to the roles entitled to them
- Pricing data never leaves the permission boundary it lives in today
- Freshness is a hard requirement — a stale cost is worse than no answer
- Reads from the existing ERP and stock system rather than replacing them
One organisation. Every department. This is the order.
Your organisation is in one sector, and inside it sits every department below. The platform is the same for all of them — what the sector decides is which one goes first, and that choice matters more than any model decision.
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01 Sales & Revenue Usually first
The quotation bottleneck is the most expensive and most measurable problem in the business. Fix it and the platform pays for itself before the second department starts.
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02 Operations Then
Stock, lead times and supplier documentation — the same corpus viewed from the fulfilment side.
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03 Finance & Accounting Then
Credit limits, payment terms and the margin reporting that closes the loop on quoting.
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04 Customer Service Fast follow
Order status and product questions, answered from the same index the sales desk uses.
What we would deploy.
If the constraints above rule out anything leaving your premises, the same platform ships on hardware you own.
Talk to someone who has shipped in wholesale, distribution & trading.
A first call is a working session, not a pitch. Bring your constraint list and we will tell you which parts are genuinely hard.