Walk into almost any plant storeroom and you'll find the plant's own item numbers on the shelf. They come from the CMMS or the ERP, they're how maintenance planners write work orders, and they're what the buyer types when he needs something. Your part number is the third or fourth thing on his mind.
If ordering from you means translating his number into yours, you've made yourself harder to buy from than you need to be.
Let them order with their own numbers
With customer part numbers, the plant orders using its own numbers and the app matches each one to your item. The planner pastes his PM kit list straight from the CMMS export. The storeroom clerk types the number he sees on the shelf. Your team never has to look up "what's MX-40217 again?"
Set it up on a master account and every location underneath inherits the same cross-references, so a company with three plants doesn't need three separate setups. Anything set on a single location overrides the master when a plant does things its own way.
My Catalog: everything they've ever bought
My Catalog shows the customer everything they've ever ordered from you. For an MRO account that might be a few hundred items across janitorial, abrasives, hand tools, electrical and fluids. Instead of digging through a full industrial catalog, the buyer sees his own list, with his own numbers, at his own prices.
It's also a quiet reminder of how much he already buys from you, and a natural place to notice what's missing.
Take over a competitor's storeroom one scan at a time
This is where cross-references turn into new business. Plenty of plants have another distributor's labels on their bins, often a national with a vending program or a managed crib. Converting those bins usually means someone building a spreadsheet line by line.
The app lets your rep scan another distributor's bin label, from Fastenal, Imperial and others, and get your matching item. Behind that is a cross-reference table with every competitor part number matched to yours, and a progress view that shows how many items are crossed to each competitor and what's still in progress.
A practical way to run a conversion:
- Walk the storeroom with the maintenance manager and scan the competitor labels on the fastest-moving bins first.
- Let the app match what it can, and flag the rest for your team to cross by hand.
- Price the matched list and quote it as one package, not item by item.
- Print your own bin labels for every converted bin, with the plant's part numbers on them.
The rule for the table is that every match is checked on size, thread, length, grade and finish before it counts, so a cross is something your team can stand behind. When an item truly can't be matched, it goes to purchasing as a quote request instead of guesswork.
Why this wins accounts
Plants don't switch suppliers lightly, and maintenance managers have long memories. One missed fitting during a changeover, one wrong guard bolt on a Saturday, and the new supplier is the one who gets blamed.
That's why the details above matter so much. The fear isn't price; it's the hassle of relearning part numbers and the risk that something critical gets missed. When you show up having already crossed their storeroom, with their numbers on your labels, the switching cost mostly disappears. The buyer gets the same numbers, the techs get the same shelves, and the only thing that changes is who refills them.
Want to see it with your own catalog? See how it works.