Centrix

Snapshot

What they do

A dental products manufacturer — roughly 300 SKUs across five or six brands — selling into dental practices through dealers. Their reps create demand at the practice; the practice then buys off a dealer's shelf.

Where this stands

A proposal is with them and a working conversation is live.

The relationship

Feb 2026

Introduced and first discovery conversation.

6 Mar 2026

A deep-dive working session. Their commercial lead walked through the business on screen and confirmed the read back.

16 Mar 2026

Proposal delivered — a scoping phase followed by two workstreams.

Aug 2026

Distributor data files received and analysed; a recommended data model and a company-identity definition written.

Where they started

Because they sell through dealers rather than directly, only about a fifth of their customers are visible to them at all. The rest bought through a distributor and nothing came back — no name, no practice, no purchase history.

The data that would close that gap already exists, and it arrives every month. Around two fifths of their customers are large multi-location buyers on contract pricing, and the monthly chargeback files reconciling those contracts are the richest customer records the business has. None of it reaches the system where anyone could act on it.

There was also a trust problem with what they already had. A rollup object built on an earlier integration still displays spend totals for periods with no purchases at all. The integration behind it broke and nothing announced it — so the view kept reporting, confidently, on nothing.

What we delivered

An analysis of their real distributor files, establishing what can and cannot be matched
A written definition of the company-identity problem — what counts as one customer when the same practice appears differently across dealers
A recommended data model, deriving customer value from source records rather than storing a rollup that can silently rot
An independent read of a competing vendor's approach, against their own history

What changed

The chargeback files stopped being an accounting artefact and became the answer to the visibility problem. That reframing is what the engagement now turns on.

The argument against storing rollups was settled by their own experience rather than by assertion: derive the number from the records that produce it, and it cannot quietly go stale the way the existing view did.