I spent fourteen years running an AV business before I started Specifi, and the part of the week I disliked most was procurement. Not because the suppliers were difficult, but because the workflow with them was. PO goes out as a PDF on an email thread. Confirmation comes back as a reply in the same thread. Dispatch comes back as a different reply, sometimes from a different email address. Invoice comes back ten days later with a slightly different SKU code than the one on the PO. Reconciliation lives in a spreadsheet.
Every step of that workflow is a workaround for the absence of shared infrastructure. The integrator has their tool. The supplier has theirs. The PDF is the lowest-common-denominator bridge between them. It works the way email worked in 1998: well enough, until it does not.
What "supplier collaboration software" actually means
It is not a CRM with a supplier tab. It is a shared workspace where the integrator and the supplier see the same data on each side of the relationship. The catalogue is live, not a spreadsheet emailed twice a year. The supplier sees their products on real proposals; the integrator sees current cost and current availability on every quote.
The PDF is the lowest-common-denominator bridge between two tools that should be one workflow.
Matthew, Specifi
What changes when the workflow is shared
- Catalogue updates flow in real time. A supplier changes a cost, the integrator's next proposal picks it up. Nobody emails a price book.
- POs come from the job, not a spreadsheet. Specifi raises the PO from the project and splits it by supplier, and it goes to the supplier by email. Goods are received by hand against the PO, so checking a delivery is a yes-or-no question, not a forty-minute Excel exercise.
- Supplier-side analytics get useful. Distributors can see which products are showing up on real proposals across the integrator network. That signal is worth more than any white-paper survey.
- Specifying gets faster. The integrator pulls a product into a proposal; the right SKU, the right cost, the right image, the right datasheet are all there. No "did you mean SKU XYZ-ABC or SKU XYZ-A-BC?" emails.
Who is already doing this
A growing set of distributors are connected to the Specifi catalogue today, including ADI, Snap One, Nice North America and Origin Acoustics. The supplier surface covers live cost, live RRP, live images, and live datasheets. Non-connected suppliers still work; their POs go through Specifi as PDFs by email, the same as everyone else's, just without the live pricing feed.
The trade view
Procurement is the area where most AV businesses can recover ten to fifteen hours a week without hiring anyone. The block is not effort; it is workflow. Once the workflow is shared, the hours come back. Have a look at the supplier surface or book a demo and let us show you what it looks like with the suppliers you already buy from.