"It saves time" is the most common thing distributors say about moving buyers onto a portal, and the hardest thing to put a number on. Here is a simple formula to turn that feeling into hours per week, using your own order volume.
When people estimate portal savings, they usually think only of the phone call itself — a few minutes per order. That undercounts it. A phone or email order touches staff time in at least four places: taking the order, re-keying it into fulfillment, answering the follow-up call about status, and preparing it for invoicing. A portal order removes staff time from most of those, because the buyer enters it once and it arrives ready to confirm.
Pick your own figures for these four inputs and the math holds for any distributor, regardless of size: weekly order volume, minutes spent taking each order by phone or transcribing an email, minutes spent on the average status-check call, and minutes spent preparing an order for invoicing. Multiply weekly order volume by the total minutes across those three staff touchpoints, then divide by 60. That is your current weekly hours spent on order handling — and roughly the ceiling on what shifting that volume to a portal can give back.
As an illustrative example, not a claim about any real distributor: 60 orders a week, 6 minutes to take each one by phone, 3 minutes for a status-check call on roughly half of those orders, and 4 minutes preparing each for invoicing. That works out to (60 × 6) + (30 × 3) + (60 × 4) = 690 minutes, or about 11.5 hours a week. Run the same formula against your own order count and average call lengths — the shape of the math matters more than this specific total.
The order-taking minutes mostly disappear, since a buyer entering their own order does not require someone at the front desk to answer a call and write it down. The status-check minutes mostly disappear too, since a buyer checking their own order history does not need to call and ask what shipped. The invoicing-prep minutes shrink rather than vanish, since a confirmed order still needs a quick review — but reviewing structured line items takes a fraction of the time of typing them in from a phone note or a PDF.
Reclaimed time from order handling rarely shows up as one clean block on a schedule — it shows up as fewer interruptions across a week, which is harder to point to but just as real. The distributors who get the most out of it treat those hours as capacity to plan around deliberately: catching up on RFQs, following up with buyers who have gone quiet, or simply reducing how often front-desk staff have to drop what they are doing to answer the phone. An 11.5-hour week, recalculated against your own order volume, is the number worth bringing into that conversation.
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