A morning of logins
Your provisioning coordinator starts the day with a list of browser tabs. The voice wholesaler's partner portal. The broadband and ethernet supplier's portal, where each order has its own milestone page. The mobile distributor's dealer site. A number range supplier. The old analogue line supplier you still use for a few customers. Each one wants its own login and some want a code from a phone.
In each portal they look for anything that moved: an engineer appointment booked, a survey result, a delay notice, a request for more information. They copy the useful bits into the CRM or a shared spreadsheet so sales and account managers can see them. By the time that round is done it is late morning, and the first status is already out of date.
When they are off sick, nobody else knows which portal holds what.
Why it ends up this way
Every supplier builds its portal for its own products and its own partners. None of them is built for a reseller who buys from five of them.
- Status names differ: one supplier's 'in progress' is another's 'awaiting survey'.
- Some updates are only shown in the portal, some are only emailed, and some are both but not at the same time.
- Ethernet and leased line orders have many milestones and long timelines, so the important change (a wayleave needed, excess construction charges) is easy to miss among routine ones.
- Supplier notifications go to whoever placed the order, so they follow people rather than customers.
- Your CRM has no field that a supplier can update, so every change is copied by hand.
What the portal round costs
The time is the visible cost. The bigger one is lag. A request for access information from a supplier that is seen two days late can move a leased line install by weeks. An excess construction charge that needs customer approval, missed for a week, becomes an awkward conversation.
| Supplier update | If seen late |
|---|---|
| Engineer appointment offered | Slot lost, next one much later |
| Customer access details required | Order put on hold by the supplier |
| Excess construction charges quoted | Approval deadline missed, order cancelled |
| Order rejected for bad address | Whole order restarts |
| Delivery date moved | Customer and engineer not told |
Account managers also lose time asking provisioning for updates, and provisioning loses time answering them.
One order view across your suppliers
- We start with a list of your suppliers and what each one offers: an API, structured notification emails, or only a portal.
- For each supplier we build a connector. API where possible. Where there is none, we read the supplier's status emails from a dedicated mailbox, and as a last resort a scheduled check of the portal where the supplier's terms allow it.
- Every supplier status is mapped to your own stages (ordered, survey, awaiting customer, install booked, live, problem), so an order looks the same whoever supplies it.
- Orders are linked to the customer and the sale in your CRM, and the current stage and next date are written back to it.
- Changes that need action (a request for information, a charge to approve, a rejection, a slipped date) create a task for a named person with the supplier's own wording attached.
- Routine milestones are recorded but do not alert anyone, so the alerts that do arrive mean something.
Placing orders still happens in the supplier portals if you prefer. The view is about knowing where things are without going to look.
What the team gets back
The coordinator's morning starts with a short list of orders that need something, not a round of logins. Account managers see stage and next date on the customer record and stop asking. Directors can see how many orders are in flight, with which supplier, and which ones have been stuck longest, which is useful when you review supplier performance.
When a supplier changes its portal, the connector needs attention, and we tell you straight away rather than letting the view quietly go stale.
Is this your situation?
- Someone spends the first part of every day checking supplier portals.
- Order updates are copied into a spreadsheet by hand.
- A supplier request for information has been missed and delayed an install.
- Account managers ask provisioning for status several times a day.
- Only one person really knows how every portal works.