The digital stack inside many B2B organizations didn’t take shape through a single plan. It formed in pieces: an ERP from one acquisition, a portal from another, a custom workflow built years ago that everyone still depends on.
Those pieces held together for a while, until the workload increased and small inconsistencies started showing up where customers could see them.
Those breaks hurt more now. Sixty-seven percent of procurement professionals make most purchases digitally, meaning backend fragmentation shows up immediately as ordering errors or inventory mismatches.
We just published a new report with Modern Distribution Management (MDM) that looks directly at this issue. It details how technical debt accumulates inside distribution companies, how it paralyzes day-to-day selling, and the architectural shifts leaders are making to stop the bleeding.
For more insights from operators and deeper context, download the full report.
How Tech Debt Occurred, And How Teams Feel It Now
Investors love a merger. They see territory expansion and consolidated market share. Operations teams see the reality: a technological “Frankenstein.”
Joe DeMarco from LINC Systems describes this clearly in the report. You end up with “an arm from here, a leg from there.” You inherit legacy ERPs, varying data structures, and incompatible customer records. Stellar Industrial Supply, for instance, has acquired 10 companies since 2021. Every deal brings a new stack that has to talk to the mothership.
If you don’t have a strategy to unify that data immediately, you get “reporting blindness.” The report describes financial administrators forcing general ledger data into spreadsheets manually just to close the month. You can’t make decisions on margins or inventory transfers because you can’t actually see what is happening across the branches.
The Trap of Custom “Glue”
When systems don’t talk, the instinct is to force them. IT teams build custom integrations – middleware “glue” – to connect a modern commerce front-end to an aging backend.
This works until it doesn’t.
The whitepaper breaks down the cost of this approach. A vendor updates a platform, and your custom API calls break. Orders stop flowing. Pricing fails to update. Your team spends days diagnosing a cascade of failures instead of shipping product.
Worse, this fragility stops you from upgrading. You stay locked on old, insecure versions of software because moving to the new version would require rebuilding all that custom code from scratch.
A Unified Layer, Not a Total Rebuild
The most aggressive example in the report comes from an HVAC distributor that completed 18 acquisitions. They found themselves sitting on 12 different ERP systems, including JD Edwards.
Replacing 12 ERPs is a multi-year nightmare. Instead, they utilized a unified B2B eCommerce layer. They placed OroCommerce on top of the fractured backend. This gave customers a single place to order, track shipments, and pay invoices.
The customer doesn’t care that the warehouse in Ohio runs on a different system than the plant in Texas. They see one interface. The unified platform handles the translation of data to the various ERPs in the background.
That single interface matters: 67% of procurement professionals now make most purchases through digital channels, and they expect systems that work consistently across every touchpoint.
What Else You’ll Find in the Report
The report goes deeper than the patterns we’ve touched on here:
- Where integration failures showed up in customer interactions
- Where digital investments lose their value
- How teams reorganized their commerce structure before tackling new projects
- The early moves leaders made to reduce tech debt without disrupting daily operations
If you want the full picture, including the moments leaders said changed their thinking, the complete report is the place to start.
