Enterprise Dealer Portal Replacement
Replacing a vendor portal with 1–2 minute load times with a custom platform built to be the primary channel between manufacturer and dealer network.
The Problem
A mid-market manufacturer's dealer-facing portal was built by an outside consulting firm and delivered (from what internal records suggest) still in development. What the company got was a web application with 1–2 minute initial load times, tightly coupled to the ERP, largely undocumented, and fragile enough that a user can't even log in without someone on the internal team completing a manual step first.
The portal itself offers almost nothing. Dealers can see their orders at a high abstraction level with no useful detail, view that invoices exist, and receive a shipment notification with no tracking information, even though tracking numbers exist and are already sent via email from the ERP. The quoting feature sends an email to a shared inbox. That's the entire product.
When asked about portal usage, account managers said most dealers just call in directly. The portal was effectively abandoned by the people it was built for, and the company was still paying for it.
What We're Building
This project is currently in active development. Phase 1 is underway.
Phase 1: Core Portal Replacement
Complete rebuild of the dealer experience. Order tracking with real depth: actual status, useful detail at every level, not a high-level abstraction that tells dealers nothing. Invoice management, shipment tracking with carrier integration, and account management where dealers actually control their own teams. Each dealer organization gets a principal user who manages their own people and permissions, eliminating internal manual processes just to get someone logged in.
The goal isn't feature parity with the old portal. It's building what the old portal should have been: a platform dealers actually use instead of picking up the phone.
Phase 2: Order Entry & Quoting
Direct order submission and quoting workflows for both catalog and parametric products. Orders still hit a validation and scheduling layer on the manufacturer's side, but the process moves from email threads and phone calls to a structured workflow. This is where the portal shifts from an information tool to an actual sales channel.
Architecture & Infrastructure
Next.js and TypeScript frontend, .NET Web API backend for ERP integration and business logic, deployed on Azure AKS with full CI/CD through Azure DevOps. Multi-tenant dealer access with organization-level data isolation. Stood up the full Azure infrastructure and DevOps pipeline from scratch as part of the project, not inherited or handed off by another team.
Architecture is designed so Phase 2 builds on Phase 1 without reworking the foundation.