Real-time lead time automation across 5,500+ SKUs for an $8M HVAC distributor
Scheduled automation pulling live availability from GE and Bosch supplier portals and pushing accurate hourly lead times to a Massachusetts HVAC distributor website.
The challenge
A Massachusetts HVAC distributor with $8M in revenue carried 5,500+ SKUs across GE, Bosch, and three smaller supplier lines. Lead times changed daily based on supplier availability, but the website showed "stock estimate" placeholders that hadn't been updated in weeks.
Contractors started calling to verify before quoting. Inside sales spent 4-6 hours per day answering "is this actually in stock?" calls. The website was supposed to remove that friction. Instead it added a layer of distrust.
The solution
We built scheduled scrapers and API pulls that hit each supplier portal every hour, normalized the data across vendor-specific SKU taxonomies, and synced the consolidated lead time map to the website CMS via a CSV pipeline.
Map each supplier's data surface (API, portal, CSV export)
Build Python scrapers and API clients per source
Normalize SKU taxonomy across vendors into one record set
Sync to website CMS hourly with diff-based update
Slack alerts on scraper failure or anomaly
What we shipped on.
The outcome
Contractors stopped calling to verify lead times. The inside sales team got their day back. The website went from a liability to an asset. Five weeks from kickoff to production.
Our contractor base stopped calling to verify lead times. The website is accurate enough they just trust it. That alone freed up our inside sales team for actual selling.
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