Large customers are often the hardest to integrate with. Discover why traditional models fail distributors, and how one-to-many connectivity supports scale and stronger relationships.
In distribution, smaller trading partners are sometimes blamed for inefficiency. They’re seen as less digitized, more manual, and slower to adapt.
But in reality, many distributors experience the opposite problem. It’s often their largest customers, who are the most technologically advanced, that introduce the most friction into the supply chain.
Large customers invest heavily in digital transformation. They modernize systems, automate processes, and push aggressively for electronic connectivity. The challenge is that this progress rarely follows a standard path.
Distributors are frequently asked to support customer-specific data fields, unique document structures, additional filetypes, or non-standard interpretations of EDI. These requirements change often as customers evolve their systems, adopt new platforms, or update internal processes.
And while these customers expect flexibility from their trading partners, they rarely offer it in return.
The message is clear: adapt to us or risk the relationship.
On the surface, the trade-off seems reasonable. Big customers place big orders. But the cost goes beyond development hours.
Each custom integration pulls attention away from broader digital initiatives. Smaller trading partners, who may collectively represent significant revenue, are deprioritized because they don’t demand immediate action.
Over time, distributors are left with a fragmented operation and a growing backlog of “temporary” workarounds that become permanent.
This isn’t just an operational issue. It’s a relationship one.
Strong distributor–customer relationships depend on reliability and consistency. When integrations are constantly changing, trust erodes. Errors increase. Manual intervention creeps back in.
At the same time, over-accommodating a few large customers can strain relationships across the rest of the network. Smaller trading partners feel overlooked, and collaboration suffers.
Digital transformation only delivers value when it supports all relationships, not just the loudest ones.
The real issue is relying on point-to-point integration models that weren’t built for scale or constant evolution. Each customer becomes a one-off project. Every system change introduces new risk. Nothing moves quickly without significant effort.
That approach doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t support long-term relationships.
Supply Cloud was built to remove the burden of customer-driven complexity.
With a one-to-many integration model, distributors can operate in consistent formats while Supply Cloud manages customer-specific requirements behind the scenes. As customers change systems, standards, or protocols, those changes are absorbed by the platform, not your internal teams.
The result is connectivity that scales as customers evolve, equal support for large and small trading partners, fewer custom builds, and more time to focus on relationships.
Instead of technology dictating how relationships function, distributors regain control.
System upgrades and new requirements aren’t slowing down. But distributors don’t have to chase every change at the expense of efficiency or trust.
When integration is designed to handle complexity, distributors can support their biggest customers without sacrificing the rest of their network.
Supply Cloud (a division of LBMX) drives the commercial relationship between suppliers and their customers. Leveraging a unique one-to-many network, Supply Cloud is the leading B2B platform that allows suppliers to view their many independent customers through a single lens. Powered by LBMX technology solutions, Supply Cloud has revolutionized the trading relationship for EDI, product data exchange, payments, and rebate management.
