HVAC · Electrical · Plumbing
A wrong fitting stops the site.
Contractors do not order products, they order jobs. A request arrives as a list for one installation, half of it by size and half by habit, and every line has to be the right diameter, the right rating and in stock this week.
What makes this catalog hard.
The size is the product
Diameter, thread, rating, kW. Two items with nearly the same description are not interchangeable, and the difference lives in a number buried in a sentence rather than in a field.
Equivalents cross brands
A contractor names one manufacturer’s part and will accept the equivalent from another. Knowing which substitutions are real is commercial knowledge that usually lives in one experienced person’s head.
Requests are bills of materials
Not one line but forty, for a single job, often pasted from a spec or attached as a sheet. That is where the hours go, and it is the case a rep most dreads.
Trade pricing is per account
The same fitting has a different price for every account on the book. A quote priced from the list is a quote that gets rewritten before it goes out.
Where this is proven.
In lighting, not here. Our live client is a multi-brand lighting distributor, and that is where the matching engine was built and tested. We think this trade has the same shape — deep catalogs, quote-only pricing, requests as free text — and three separately funded competitors have made the same read of the market. But we would rather tell you that than imply a track record we do not have in your sector.
No client in this sector yet. Lighting is where it runs today.
Questions from the trade.
Have you done this for an HVAC distributor?
Not yet. Our production client is in lighting. The underlying problem — resolving a written request against a deep catalog with per-customer pricing — is the same, but we are not going to claim experience in your trade that we do not have.
Can it handle a forty-line bill of materials?
That is the case where the time saving is largest. Attachments are read, including spreadsheets and PDFs, and each line is resolved separately with its own status rather than the list being accepted or rejected as a whole.
Will it guess a substitution?
No. A near-miss is flagged as Check match for a person to confirm. Substitution is a commercial judgement about what a customer will accept, not a lookup, and it stays with your team.
We take a lot of orders by phone. Does that matter?
Ettore works on what arrives in writing — email and attachments. If most of your volume is spoken at a trade counter, the gain is smaller and we would say so early rather than after a pilot.
Test it against your catalog.
Send a real request with its awkward lines. That tells us both whether this shape fits your trade far better than a conversation does.