Home » Case Studies » DHE Parts: A Procurement Portal Built for a 200,000-SKU Catalog
CASE STUDY
/
B2B Commerce · A Procurement Portal
DHE Parts: A Procurement Portal Built for a 200,000-SKU Catalog
How we replaced DHE Parts’ off-the-shelf ERP with a purpose-built portal managing a 200,000-SKU catalog – cutting quote cycles 4x and vendor price updates from two weeks to two hours.
DHE Parts distributes heavy-equipment components – engine parts, filtration, hydraulic assemblies, ground-engaging tools – to fleet operators, dealer networks, and repair shops. The company’s catalog spans roughly 200,000 SKUs sourced from dozens of vendors, each with its own pricing sheet, part-numbering scheme, and lead time.
The Challenge
DHE Parts ran on Odoo, an off-the-shelf ERP that technically supported every workflow the business needed – which was exactly the problem: nothing was ever fully missing, so nothing ever got fixed. A few specific issues compounded daily:
Quote-to-order handoff lost information every time, since fields didn’t map cleanly between documents, forcing reps to rekey data and second-guess whether numbers still matched
Vendor price updates were a two-week manual project – staging spreadsheets and matching SKUs by hand across dozens of vendor sheets, with no real rollback if something went wrong
Every document leaving the business looked like generic Odoo output, not DHE’s own brand
Reporting was static and slow, taking a rep up to twenty minutes to answer a question as simple as what’s in the pipeline this month
Our Approach
01
Portal-First, WP Admin as Escape Hatch
Staff spend the day inside a purpose-built portal we control. WP admin stays available for the 2% of edge cases.
02
Direct SQL for Catalog-Scale Writes
WooCommerce’s per-row hook cascade melts on 200K products. We use direct SQL for bulk updates, and WC’s object graph only for creates.
03
Two-Way Sync, Never Silent Drift
Quote ↔ vendor PO stays in step both ways. Additions propagate, removals sync out, received lines stay untouched.
04
Every Change Ships with an E2E Script
No manual test checklists. Each non-trivial change ships with a runnable PHP script that seeds real data, asserts outcomes and cleans up.
05
Audit Every State Change
Every mutation writes an audit-log entry with actor, before/after & reason. Bulk price runs snapshot rows before write, with one-click rollback.
FINAL OUTCOME
Web App Ui
Results & Impact
The visible outcome is a portal DHE staff prefer to Odoo. Behind that preference are the numbers on the right – measured after the full four-phase build.
47+
Features shipped end-to-end
2hr
Vendor price refresh (was ~2 weeks)
200K
SKUs under management
Core Features Delivered
✓
Full Quote-to-Invoice Lifecycle
Q- → PI- → PO- → SHP- → INV-. One document, one number, followed end-to-end. Editable proforma numbers when accounting needs them.
✓
Vendor PO Automation
Two-way sync between quote and PO. Add / remove lines flow both ways, received lines stay untouched, one-click “Receive all remaining”.
✓
Multi-Shipment Tracking
One order can ship in one box or ten. Per-shipment carrier, tracking and packing slip; live customer address on every doc.
✓
Vendor Price Update Tool
45K prices in one atomic run with pre-write snapshot and one-click rollback. Direct SQL bypasses WC’s 30-hook per-row cascade.
✓
Analytics Dashboard
One filter bar for date, status, reps, customers, brands, countries, regions. Every combination resolves in under a second, exports to PDF.
✓
B2B Payments & Credit Terms
Immediate + Net-30 flows, partial payments, dedicated Invoices menu. Auto-completes on funds received, full audit trail on every step.
DHE Parts ran on Odoo, an off-the-shelf ERP that technically supported every workflow but never forced any of the underlying problems to actually get fixed. Syndell built a purpose-built portal instead, so staff work in a system designed around DHE’s actual catalog scale rather than a general-purpose tool stretched to fit.
The portal follows one document, one number through the full lifecycle, quote through invoice, so fields don’t lose information moving between documents and reps don’t have to rekey data or second-guess whether numbers still match.
Vendor price updates now run in about two hours instead of the two-week manual process DHE Parts used before, with a pre-write snapshot and one-click rollback if something goes wrong.
Staff spend their day inside the purpose-built portal, with WordPress admin kept available only as an escape hatch for edge cases, so the portal handles the day-to-day work without being locked out of WordPress entirely.
Multi-shipment tracking supports per-shipment carrier and tracking information and packing slips, with the live customer address reflected on every document, whether an order ships in one box or ten.
The portal supports immediate payment and Net-30 terms, partial payments, and a dedicated invoices menu that auto-completes once funds are received, with a full audit trail on every step.
Yes. Syndell builds purpose-built procurement and catalog portals for businesses that have outgrown what an off-the-shelf ERP can reliably handle at scale.
Have a Procurement Portal in Mind?
Whatever system you’re running on now, describe where it’s slowing your team down and we’ll map what a purpose-built portal would take.
This platform lets people tap an NFC card on a smartphone to instantly share contact details, social profiles, and custom links. Adoption of a new technology, cards that stay easy to scan, and the safety of shared contact data all had to be solved in one simple builder.
Web App DevelopmentDrag-and-Drop BuilderCustomizable TemplatesSecure Data Sharing
Tyreoo oversees goods transportation and fleet operations for clients ranging from a single vehicle to an entire fleet. Managers needed live visibility, faster responses to maintenance and driver issues, and reports they could act on, all in one platform.
Web App DevelopmentReal-Time TrackingMaintenance ManagementDriver Scoring
This clothing manufacturer does the hard part well – producing men’s apparel out of Ahmedabad, India, at real production scale. The existing system wasn’t carrying its weight: the Laravel and Angular codebase needed optimization, and inventory and sales features needed rebuilding for a more secure, user-centric experience.
Web Application DevelopmentUI/UX DesignInventory Management
Ecommerce / Premium Bedding and ERP Order Management
Highgrove is a UK premium bedding brand that ran sales and orders on a desktop ERP. Manual order handling, inconsistent pricing, and weak access control called for a secure web app connected to its existing Sage system.
Web Application DevelopmentSage IntegrationUI/UX DesignOrder Process AutomationDynamic Pricing Mechanisms
Praiki connects verified clients with verified professionals across Africa. Hiring there ran through social media and referrals, so trust, scope, payment, and reputation all depended on chance.
This data platform turns scattered fleet and driver information into something a sales team can actually use. Collecting it by hand wasn’t sustainable: public sources are unstructured and often outdated, so the work needed a single system that scrapes, cleans, and organizes records, then makes them easy to search, filter, and turn into leads.
Dispatcher-Driver CoordinationUI/UX DesignCompliance TrackingWeb Application Development
This scheduling platform brings physicians, facilities, and medical vendors into one place, with availability, OR rooms, and vendor requests all visible together. The old way wasn’t holding up: three groups working from separate calendars needed a single connected system that syncs with Google and Outlook and pulls patient data from major EHRs, deployed on AWS with DynamoDB.
Custom Web Application DevelopmentEHR/EMR IntegrationsRole-Based Platform DesignCalendar IntegrationsAI Chat Support
HWA does the hard part well – connecting clients with verified holistic practitioners across yoga, nutrition therapy, hypnotherapy, and chiropractic care. The old process wasn’t carrying its weight: practitioners and clients coordinated sessions through separate tools and manual communication, with no shared system for bookings, packages, or payments.
Custom Web Application DevelopmentAdmin DashboardDynamic Availability HandlingBooking & Package ManagementCalendar & Video IntegrationsAI Chat Assistant
Clutch Up does the hard part well – bringing the fantasy sports format users already understand into competitive esports tournaments. The platform wasn’t carrying its weight yet: tournament and player data needed to stay accurate in real time, and esports rosters change mid-event in ways traditional fantasy models don’t handle.
Platform Design & DevelopmentTournament Data API IntegrationPlayer Drafting SystemDynamic Availability Handling
29%Increase in Active Weekly Users During Tournament Windows
41%Reduction in Data Lag
Book Your Notary
Legal / Notary Services
Book Your Notary does the hard part well – connecting customers with a bilingual notary team for documents that need remote notarization. The old process wasn’t carrying its weight: arranging in-person appointments turned a simple requirement into a recurring hassle, without cutting the corners that make notarization valid.
<span style="font-size:16px">Less than</span> 90sTO BOOK A NOTARY
75%LESS ADMIN COORDINATION TIME
50 <span style="font-size:16px">States</span>UNLIMITED NOTARIES, ZERO DOUBLE-BOOKINGS
A Brief Mate
LegalTech / Legal Operations
BriefMate does the hard part well – automatically renaming legal documents and assembling court-ready briefs for Australian law firms. The old process wasn’t carrying its weight: paralegals spent days downloading, converting, ordering, and indexing files by hand, with inconsistent naming that made documents hard to find later.
