Order management and logistics back office for a Japanese manufacturer

Order management, parts availability enquiries, warranty administration and dealer support were handled by a small team in the North American head office that had not grown with the dealer network. Dealers waited days for parts availability answers, which in industrial equipment means customer downtime and warranty exposure. The parent company in Japan required reporting discipline the local team did not have capacity to produce. And the group's cross-border footprint under CUSMA meant documentation errors carried customs and duty consequences.

We built a dedicated team in Ontario covering dealer order entry and management, parts availability and quotation, warranty claim administration, shipment tracking and exception handling, and trade documentation support for cross-border movements. Ontario was chosen for time zone coverage across all three markets and for English, French and Spanish capability in one location.

We integrated directly with the client's ERP rather than working from exported spreadsheets, which is what had made the previous process slow and error-prone. Reporting to the Japanese parent was rebuilt to their format and cadence, with a Japanese-capable coordinator to handle correspondence and terminology.

Dedicated team, Ontario, covering Pacific through Eastern business hours, with defined escalation into the client's regional management.

Dealer parts availability response time reduced from a multi-day average to under two hours. Order entry error rate fell 67 percent following ERP integration. Warranty claim processing time halved. Trade documentation exceptions on cross-border shipments reduced substantially, which the client quantified as a material reduction in duty and customs remediation cost. Dealer satisfaction, which the client had never previously measured, was established as a metric and improved every quarter of the engagement.

The client had assumed the problem was headcount. It was partly integration. A team working from stale exports cannot answer an availability question quickly no matter how many people are on it.