The plant accounts a bearing and PT distributor keeps for decades are usually the ones somebody reviews. A few times a year, a rep or manager sits with the maintenance manager or reliability engineer and goes over what the plant bought, what failed, what it cost and what could improve. The problem is that pulling those numbers together by hand takes hours, so reviews tend to happen only when an account is already slipping.
The app puts the numbers in front of you without a spreadsheet.
For the owner: the business on one screen
The exec dashboard shows sales, margin, cash, receivables and pace on one screen. Company goal shows the month, year to date and the year at this pace. Rep pace to goal shows each rep's month against goal. It is what you want on your phone before Monday's meeting.
What to bring to an account review
A useful review with a plant or OEM customer draws on a few simple views:
- Top accounts up and down: the ten accounts buying more than last year and the ten buying less.
- Category gaps: what the customer buys from you and what they buy elsewhere. A plant buying your bearings but not your motors, gearboxes or lubrication is an opening.
- Customers slipping: regular items that have stopped coming.
- Customer health: which customers are slipping, at risk or lost.
- Pull up a customer: everything about one account on one screen.
Bring those to a review and the conversation gets specific. "You bought timing belts from us every month until the spring and then stopped. What changed?" leads somewhere. "How are we doing?" rarely does.
Reports customers see themselves
Customers can see their own spend, usage and category reports in the app. Maintenance managers use these more than you might expect. When the plant manager asks why maintenance spending went up, the maintenance manager can show which categories drove it. When the budget is set, he has a year of real usage to work from.
That keeps you in the conversation. A maintenance manager who runs his storeroom from your reports brings your name into every budget meeting. If his plants also use approvals and budgets in the app, the reports match how he already controls spending, plant by plant under a master account.
Corrective action reports add something special to PT reviews. Open CARs sit on the account, so a review can cover the repeated bearing failure on line three, the root cause found and the fix made, alongside the numbers. For a reliability-minded plant, that conversation is often worth more than any price discussion.
Make reviews a habit
The weekly rep review email goes to each rep every Monday with their own accounts, and the GM desk gets everyone, so the numbers stay in front of the team without anyone building a report.
Keep each review short: fifteen minutes with two or three useful numbers. Ask what is coming, such as a new line, a planned shutdown, a machine being replaced or a capital project. PT work follows those projects, and the distributor who hears first usually gets the drive package, not just the replacement bearings.
Pick your top ten plant and OEM accounts and book a short review with each this quarter. Bring the category gaps and the slipping items. You will rarely leave without an order, a lead or an early warning.
Want to walk through it with your own plant and OEM customers? Book a demo.