Torqued worked to abstract away the complexity of similar yet very different ways to interface with manufacturers (“upstream”) and sales channels (“downstream”). The company now has a system that can integrate with any manufacturer, take the data in the manufacturer’s format, and then normalize it to Torqued Distribution’s internal structure, making it more efficient, unified, and user friendly. Torqued also built its own stack, so it wouldn’t be reliant on third-party systems.
“I see way too many companies operating with a fuzzy source of truth,” Trampedach says. “Some companies will say, ‘We have stock data over here, inventory data over there, and then product data somewhere else,’ right?” That means that all parties, including consumers, are not getting the most up-to-date product and pricing data. “That’s going to inevitably lead to failure,” he says.
Now when data from the Torqued Distribution system is displayed or exported, it appears on the company retail site, a dealer portal, exports effortlessly to its dealers, and can even be pushed to Amazon, where Torqued does some B2C business, as well as to the three biggest e-commerce platforms, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Shopify—all keyed off by a single source of truth in real time.
The Takeaway: The company’s automated system has drastically reduced the number of order defects—including wrong orders, wrong prices on orders, or generally lousy customer experiences. With only six full-time employees, Torqued remains a small upstart, but by making it more efficient to work with the data they have, those employees now have the bandwidth to focus on setting up processes to drive long-term value. The company is also able to provide a number of free value-added services that its competitors can’t, such as offering apps for e-commerce stores and helping with getting intial products loaded on dealers’ stores.
“When you prepare by having the right product data, pushing pricing out when needed, keeping inventory in sync in real time for dealers, and enabling one-click order processing without any manual labor except to pack the order, mistakes are rare,” Trampedach says. “But it takes the up-front effort to build automated systems to get there.”