Anyone who has worked around a commercial kitchen knows that the fire is rarely where the smoke alarm is. The alarm goes off in the dining room, but the grease has been building up in a duct three rooms away for weeks.
Distribution businesses work the same way, and we feel this is one of the least talked about problems in the industry. The customer service rep takes the angry call. The driver takes the blame at the back door. But the decision that caused it was usually made somewhere else, by someone doing their own job correctly, who had no way of knowing what it would break.
Picture a regional distributor in early November. A sales rep is closing a four-location steakhouse group that has bought from a broadliner for years. To win it, he promises to hold their ribeye price through the holidays. That same week, the buyer finds a better deal from a different beef packer and switches, protecting the margin on every steak the company sells. Meanwhile, finance notices one of the steakhouse locations has drifted past its terms and puts the whole group on credit hold until it pays.
Each decision is sound. None of the three people knows about the other two. On the first Friday in December, the group's order is held. The ribeyes that do eventually arrive come from a packer the chef has never seen, and the price on the invoice isn't the one he was promised. He calls the rep, who knows nothing about any of it. An account the company spent a year winning starts to wobble in a single afternoon.
Nobody in that story did anything wrong, and that is exactly what makes it so hard to fix.
Here is why it keeps happening. In most independent distributors, the three teams that touch a customer most each have their own number to protect. Sales is paid to grow the account, so it promises things. Purchasing is paid to protect margin and fill rate, so it switches suppliers, chases deals and makes calls on shorts. Finance is paid to protect the cash and the credit line, so it holds orders, tightens terms and questions big commitments. Each of those is the right instinct on its own. The trouble is that each team works from a partial picture. Sales doesn't see the hold, purchasing doesn't see the promise, and finance doesn't see what the deal really depends on. The only person who ever sees the whole picture is the customer, usually at the worst possible moment.
It is not that people don't care. It is that the information lives in the wrong places. The promise is in a rep's head or a text message. The supplier change is in an email to the buyer. The credit hold is a flag in the ERP that nobody in sales looks at. To connect them, someone has to notice, care and have time, all at once, and in a busy week that is rare. A lot of distributors try to solve this with a weekly meeting between sales, purchasing and finance. That is better than nothing, but the problems don't wait for Tuesday.
Now run the same week again.
When finance flags the past-due location, the rep sees it before he makes his price promise, and he raises it with the owner as part of the pitch. When the buyer switches packers, the reps whose accounts care about the brand hear about it that day, and this rep calls the chef before the delivery instead of after it. The price hold goes in as a commitment that purchasing and finance can both see. Same three people, same three decisions. The difference is that the customer hears about them from the rep instead of discovering them on the dock.
What we are seeing is that the distributors who handle this best don't have fewer silos. They have the same three teams with the same three jobs. What is different is that the signals travel. When purchasing changes something, the people who face the customer know that day. When finance holds an account, sales knows before it makes a promise. Some get there with discipline and a great operations lead. More and more are getting there with software that watches all three streams and connects them.
The bottom line is that you can't stop people from making decisions in their own lane, and you shouldn't want to. That is how a business moves fast. What you can do is stop those decisions from arriving at the customer as a surprise.
The fire always starts three rooms away. The question is whether anyone smells smoke before the customer does. At Burnt, we spend our days making sure someone does.