Manufacturing Product And Distributor Portal

Manufacturers publish a catalogue to two audiences with different needs. End customers want a short list and a price. Distributors want specifications, tolerances, datasheets and lead times, and they need access restricted. One catalogue serving both usually does neither well.

So the public side is a straightforward browsable range, and the distributor area sits behind authentication with a different navigation entirely. Documentation is versioned per product, so a distributor can be sure they are holding the current revision rather than a PDF from two years ago. Pricing is shown to distributors as a band rather than a figure, which is usually what the client’s agreements allow.

Enquiry routing was designed with the sales team rather than around a generic form. Each enquiry arrives already classified by product family and region, so nobody has to read a free-text message to work out who should pick it up.

The unglamorous work that mattered most was getting the product data structure right at the start. It is tempting to build the catalogue from whatever spreadsheet exists and clean it up later; doing that properly first cost more up front and removed a migration nobody wanted to fund later.

Testing covered the distributor login, the expiry of stale sessions and the case where a user has rights to one family but not another.

Handover included the data model, because the next change to it is the first thing that will break something.