FOUNDER EXPERIENCE / PRIOR ROLE
This page describes work Cody King completed or contributed to in a prior role. It is shared as professional background and is not a Northwerk client engagement.
Enterprise Dealer Portal Replacement
Designed and began building a replacement for a failing ERP-connected dealer portal with 1 to 2 minute load times and little useful order data.
The Problem
A mid-market manufacturer's dealer-facing portal had been built by an outside firm and delivered, from what internal records suggest, still in development. What the company got was a web application with 1 to 2 minute initial load times, tightly coupled to the ERP, largely undocumented, and fragile enough that a user couldn't log in without someone on the internal team completing a manual step first.
The portal offered very little. Dealers could 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 existed and were already sent via email from the ERP. The quoting feature sent an email to a shared inbox. That was the entire product.
When asked about portal usage, account managers said most dealers just called in directly. The portal was effectively abandoned by the people it was built for, and the company was still paying for it.
What I Designed and Built
This work was still in active development when the prior role ended. This page describes the foundation and direction at that point; it does not claim final delivery or current project status.
Phase 1: Core Portal Replacement
The first phase was scoped as a complete rebuild of the dealer experience. It covered order tracking with useful detail at every level, invoice management, shipment tracking with carrier integration, and account management where dealers could control their own teams. Each dealer organization would have a principal user who managed its people and permissions, eliminating internal manual steps just to get someone logged in.
The goal was not feature parity with the old portal. It was to build what the old portal should have been: a platform dealers would use instead of picking up the phone.
Phase 2: Order Entry & Quoting
The second phase was planned to add direct order submission and quoting workflows for both catalog and parametric products. Orders would still pass through validation and scheduling on the manufacturer's side, while the process moved from email threads and phone calls to a structured workflow.
Architecture & Infrastructure
The replacement used a Next.js and TypeScript frontend, a .NET Web API for ERP integration and business logic, and Azure AKS with CI/CD through Azure DevOps. The design used multi-tenant dealer access with organization-level data isolation. I stood up the Azure infrastructure and DevOps pipeline from scratch as part of the project rather than inheriting them from another team.
The architecture was designed so Phase 2 could build on Phase 1 without reworking the foundation.
Planned Outcome
This prior-role experience is separate from Northwerk client work. The ERP dealer portal overview explains Northwerk's current approach, the build-versus-buy tradeoff, and the questions that come up first.