How a Texas tire distributor built a complete enterprise system — from PL&CI spreadsheet parsing to real-time P&L analytics — in weeks instead of years, and what it means for the future of small-to-mid-market logistics companies.
The Problem: Too Many Spreadsheets, Not Enough Visibility
When you're moving 4,000 commercial truck tires per month through a supply chain that spans factories in Vietnam and China, ocean freight through the Port of Houston, and delivery to trucking fleets across Texas, every disconnected spreadsheet is a potential leak in your margin.
That was the reality at Oryx Wheels & Tires entering 2026. Our team was managing supplier contracts as PDFs, tracking containers through email threads, reconciling quantities by hand, and pricing tires in a POS system that couldn't talk to our procurement pipeline. We had HITS — our point-of-sale system — and it was good at what it did. But it was an island. Everything between the supplier's factory floor and the HITS inventory screen was manual.
"We were spending more time managing data than managing the business. Every container that arrived meant hours of cross-referencing Packing Lists against Sales Contracts, manually deducting quantities, and hoping the numbers balanced."
We needed something different. Not a million-dollar ERP implementation that would take 18 months and require a team of consultants. We needed something that understood our workflow — the specific way commercial tire distribution works in Texas.
What We Built: The Full Pipeline
Over several months of intensive development, we created a system that handles the entire tire lifecycle — from the moment a sales contract is signed with our suppliers to the moment a fleet customer places an order on our website.
Procurement: Where Every Dollar Matters
The system starts where our business starts: supplier relationships and contracts. When our supplier sends a sales contract PDF, we upload it and the system automatically extracts every line item — tire sizes, models, quantities, FOB prices, payment terms, and shipping schedules. No manual data entry. The AI-powered parser handles the variations in how different contracts format their tables.
From there, the contracts generate Purchase Orders that track ordered quantities against what actually ships. This is where it gets interesting.
Container Intelligence: Matching the Physical to the Financial
When our supplier packs a container, they send a Packing List & Commercial Invoice (PL&CI) — an Excel spreadsheet that lists every tire in the container with its FOB price, quantity, and container/seal number. Our system parses this document and does something no spreadsheet can do automatically:
It matches every line item against every active sales contract across our entire portfolio. The matching engine uses a scoring algorithm that considers tire size, model code (with fuzzy matching — MSL101 matches SL101), and brand. It allocates quantities across multiple contracts when a single container fills orders from different agreements. And when the numbers don't add up, the discrepancy report shows exactly what's unmatched, over-shipped, or under-shipped.
The matching engine found discrepancies in our very first import that would have taken days to catch manually. A container labeled as Onyx tires actually contained Royal Black — the model codes matched but the brand was wrong on the PL&CI. The system flagged it immediately.
Container Tracking: From On Water to Delivered
Every container moves through a clear pipeline: Booked → On Water → Customs → Released → Delivered. At each stage, our team records milestones, uploads documents (Bill of Lading, ISF, Arrival Notice, Customs Entry, Broker Invoice), and the system tracks it all with timestamps and audit trails.
When a container reaches Delivered status, two buttons appear: Create Receiving and Create Invoice. One click creates a warehouse receiving record with expected quantities pre-populated from the PL&CI. Another click generates a supplier invoice with line items, amounts, and payment schedules based on the contract terms (typically 30/40/30 splits).
Inventory: From Receiving to Revenue
When the warehouse team completes receiving — counting tires, noting damaged units, uploading photos — the system automatically increments product stock levels. These stock levels feed directly into our customer-facing inventory, our HITS POS sync, and our analytics dashboard.
The HITS Sync feature is particularly powerful. We can import our existing HITS inventory CSV to align the systems, and export an updated CSV to push price and cost changes back to HITS. The two systems stay in lockstep without manual data entry.
The Business Intelligence Layer
All of this data feeds a P&L Analytics Dashboard that would make any CFO smile. Configurable pricing tiers (Retail at 18%, Standard at 14%, Volume at 10%, Wholesale at 5%), employee salary tracking, overhead costs, and volume projections combine to show real-time profitability metrics:
- Monthly revenue and cost projections with 12-month ramp-up modeling
- Container economics: markup per container, freight costs, contribution margin
- Break-even analysis showing exactly how many tires we need to sell to cover fixed costs
- Cost breakdown visualizations (COGS, shipping, salaries, rent, utilities)
- Pricing tier distribution showing revenue by customer segment
Every number in the dashboard is configurable. Change the shipping cost per container, adjust a pricing tier, add an employee — the projections update instantly.
The Customer Experience
For our fleet customers, the system presents a clean, modern interface. The public marketing site operates as a phase-controlled brochure — unauthenticated visitors see our tire catalog without prices or stock levels, with clear calls-to-action to apply for a fleet account.
Once logged in, fleet customers get a Quick Order form — a dense, searchable table inspired by industry-standard POS interfaces. Type a tire size (even in quick-code format like "29575225"), filter by brand or position, enter quantities inline, and add everything to cart with one click. It's familiar to anyone who's used HITS or similar trade systems.
The Technical Foundation
For the technically curious, the stack is deliberately modern but pragmatic:
- Next.js 16 with the App Router — server components for data fetching, client components for interactivity
- Supabase for authentication (JWT, row-level security) and file storage (contracts, PL&CI documents, product images)
- Prisma ORM with PostgreSQL — 35+ data models covering the full procurement lifecycle
- Vercel for deployment — zero-downtime deploys from GitHub pushes
- Recharts for the analytics dashboard visualizations
- 7-role RBAC system — from warehouse workers who can only receive tires, to Inner Circle users who see full cost data and P&L
The entire system runs on serverless infrastructure. No servers to maintain, no Docker containers to orchestrate, no DevOps team required. Push to GitHub, Vercel deploys, Supabase handles the database and auth. Our Operations Manager can focus on operations, not infrastructure.
What's Next
We're just getting started. The foundation is in place for fleet-specific tier pricing (showing each customer their negotiated rates), automated reorder suggestions based on sales velocity and container lead times, and integration with freight forwarders for real-time container tracking without manual milestone updates.
But the biggest win isn't a feature — it's a mindset shift. When your procurement team can see exactly how a supplier's pricing flows through to your P&L, when your warehouse team can receive a container in minutes instead of hours, when your fleet customers can order tires as easily as they order office supplies — that's when technology stops being overhead and starts being competitive advantage.
Oryx Wheels & Tires is a Texas-based commercial tire distributor serving trucking fleets across the state. We carry Onyx and Royal Black TBR tires and provide competitive fleet pricing with fast local delivery. Learn more about fleet solutions or contact our sales team.
