Ordering promotional material without losing control

At a glance

• Starting point: Orders for field sales promotional material ran through personal channels and tied up staff time, with no real-time overview of quotas.
• Solution: We built an adaptable platform on an established shop foundation, where the manufacturer controls quantities and customer groups itself, with everything automatically connected to the warehouse management system.
• Outcome: In use for more than a decade across several pharma manufacturers, since extended with payment processing and accounting data for the entire order-to-cash flow.

The starting point

Pharma manufacturers equip their field sales teams with promotional material: pens, stickers, displays, trade-show materials. That material isn't free to produce, and not every sales group should be able to draw as much of it as it likes. So quantity control is essential, otherwise everyone ends up ordering at their own discretion.

For a long time, these orders ran through personal channels. A field sales rep reports what they need, someone at the manufacturer or the logistics provider takes the order, books the quantities and reconciles them against stock. That works, but it ties up staff and attention, and it's hard to get a real-time overview of who's already drawn how much. The logistics provider that stores and ships the material came to us with a clear request: a platform where field sales order themselves, the manufacturer controls quantities itself, and everything flows automatically into the warehouse.

Our approach

We didn't build a throwaway solution per client, but an adaptable platform on an established shop foundation that can grow with every new manufacturer and every new occasion. Every client inherits the proven foundation and gets its own gated portal.

At the centre of it sits self-service control by the manufacturer. They maintain their own products and decide which customer group can order how much of what, in which period. Field sales get access and order within these rules; internal sales get an admin login for maintenance. Everything connects to the warehouse management system: orders flow automatically into the warehouse, come back with confirmation, and shipment tracking runs alongside.

The solution

• Quantity control per customer group. The manufacturer sets allocation quantities and monthly order limits per group. The platform enforces them and flags when a quota is used up. That's the core of it: controlled allocation, with no one having to count by hand.
• Self-service for field and internal sales. Field sales order independently, internal sales maintain products and rules. The detour through manual order-taking disappears.
• Connection to the warehouse management system. Orders, confirmations and shipment tracking all run automatically.
• Reports for the manufacturer. Who ordered what, when, and how quotas are being used: all visible to the manufacturer itself, at any time.
• Specialist features that grew alongside it. Over the years, building blocks were added that hit real practical needs exactly: pre-configured orders to equip new employees with basic material, sample baskets, the return of trade-show display cases, and a trade-show calculator that works out the right quantity of material automatically from expected visitor numbers, based on the items the manufacturer has released for that show.

The turn

What began as an internal ordering tool for field sales has become core infrastructure over the years. With Shopware 5, we opened the platform up to a second audience: not just the company's own field sales team any more, but customers and wholesalers ordering directly. That brought payment into play, and the platform has since supplied the accounting data that powers the logistics provider's entire order-to-cash process.

The high point so far is the most capable build stage yet, for a major pharma manufacturer. We ported the proven modules to Shopware 5, refined them, and adapted them for a particularly demanding setup: Germany and Austria are served by one logistics provider, Switzerland by another. Both warehouse and ordering systems now converge in a single shop, with finely graded customer groups, access rights and order quantities.

The thread running through every stage: control over who gets how much kept getting finer, never more cumbersome.

The outcome

• In use for more than a decade, across several pharma manufacturers, developed and maintained together through many iterations, with software maintenance and support for the logistics provider and the manufacturers alike.
• The manufacturer controls its own promotional material, field sales order with no detour, and the logistics provider has ordering, shipping and billing in a single flow.
• The platform keeps being extended and rolled out to new manufacturers. Every new requirement is a configuration or a module, never a rebuild from scratch.

What this story shows

A good platform doesn't just solve one problem and stop there, it grows with the business. Because we master both the shop technology and the logistics behind it, a simple ordering login has grown, over the years, into a system that connects sales, warehousing and billing.

In open retail, you build shops that sell. Here, we build shops that also control who's allowed to get what, and that bring ordering, warehousing and billing together. The same craft as in e-commerce, under the stricter rules of pharma distribution.

B2B ordering portals like this are a core part of our bespoke development, and a good example of how Non-GxP systems take weight off the daily work of pharma logistics.