The short answer: At most B2B manufacturers, the single largest driver of customer service workload is routine order-status and invoice lookups — customers calling or emailing to ask “where’s my order?” and “can you resend that invoice?” Moving those routine lookups to a self-service portal removes the bulk of inbound contacts without adding staff. In a sample of 13 manufacturers, each eliminated roughly 12,000 order-status calls a year — about $140,000 in recovered customer-service cost per company.

Below is how that workload builds up, a benchmark you can use to size your own savings, and the lowest-effort way to start.

Is it normal for CSRs to spend all day on order-status calls?

It’s common — but it’s not efficient, and it’s not fixed. In a typical B2B manufacturer, a large share of every CSR’s day goes to repetitive, low-value questions: order status, expected ship dates, tracking numbers, copies of invoices, pricing and availability checks. None of these require judgment. They’re lookups — the customer just needs a few lines of data that already live in your ERP.

The reason it feels normal is that the cost is hidden. It’s spread across salaries, not billed as a line item, so “phone and email support” looks free. It isn’t. Every routine lookup a rep handles by hand is time that isn’t spent on the exceptions and relationships that actually need a human.

What’s actually driving your customer service workload?

Three patterns drive most of the avoidable volume:

• “Where’s my order?” (WISMO) calls. The highest-frequency request, and the most automatable — the answer is already in SAP.
• Invoice and document requests. Customers asking reps to look up, resend, or reconcile invoices.
• Order-entry errors and rework. Orders placed by phone, fax, and email get re-keyed by a person — which introduces mistakes that generate more calls to correct them.

The common thread: a person is acting as a lookup service for data the customer could retrieve themselves in seconds.

How much can self-service reduce CS call volume? A benchmark

Start with a simple unit cost. A reasonable industry assumption is $7.50 per customer-service interaction — calculate your own using average CSR salary and time per lookup, but $7.50 is a workable starting point.

Now multiply by the routine lookups you handle each year. To put real numbers on it, here’s what a representative subset of 13 manufacturers (medical/pharma, industrial, CPG, commercial products and more) eliminated by shifting routine lookups to self-service:

Aggregate, across all 13 clients, per year:

Average, per client, per year:

To benchmark your own number: estimate your annual order-status and invoice requests, multiply by your cost per interaction, and that’s the customer-service spend self-service can recover.

How do you cut order-status calls specifically?

Give customers a portal where they can see their own real-time order and invoice data — pulled directly from SAP, not a once-a-day export. The detail matters: if the portal shows stale or wrong data, customers stop trusting it and go back to calling, and you’ve kept the workload while adding a tool. Real-time, SAP-accurate self-service is what makes the calls actually go away.

Critically, this one needs no adoption gimmick. No one wants to call customer service to get order status — it’s a slow way to receive a few lines of data. If customers can get that information themselves in an intuitive portal, they will. The convenience is the incentive.

Start small: the Crawl / Walk / Run path

You don’t have to move customers off phone, fax, and email all at once. The lowest-risk path starts with order tracking and builds from there:

1. Crawl — Launch self-service order tracking. Customers shift routine post-order lookups to the portal. They experience it as a value-add, not a disruption, and they now have a login. With Corevist, order tracking launches in about 30 days.
2. Walk — Add online catalog browsing and ordering. The SAP integration you stood up for tracking is reused for full eCommerce — no duplicate investment — and customers already familiar with the portal adopt ordering as another value-add.
3. Run — Expand the channel. Add self-service bill pay, or stand up additional storefronts for other brands and sales areas on the same scalable SAP integration.

The takeaway

Customer-service workload at most manufacturers isn’t a staffing problem — it’s a self-service gap. Routine order-status and invoice lookups are the biggest, most automatable slice, and shifting them to a real-time, SAP-accurate portal removes the bulk of the load without adding headcount. Start with order tracking, size the savings with the benchmark above, and build from there.

The digital commerce spectrum for B2B manufacturers

The portal-versus-ecommerce distinction has always been a useful starting point for B2B manufacturers. It helps simplify a crowded market and gives teams a clearer way to sort through very different types of products.

The challenge is that it works best as a starting point, not the full picture.

In practice, digital commerce for manufacturers sits on a spectrum. On one end is straightforward customer self-service: pricing, availability, reorders, invoices, shipment tracking, and basic online ordering for existing customers. On the other is a more persuasion-driven ecommerce experience built to attract, influence, and convert, with capabilities like product discovery, merchandising, content, personalization, and promotions.

Most manufacturers are not really choosing between two separate worlds. They are choosing where they want to land on that spectrum.

The self-service end: efficiency over persuasion

A helpful way to picture this is the customer service desk at Walmart.

A shopper walks up and asks a simple question: “Is this available, and what’s my price?”

That interaction isn’t about persuading someone to buy. It’s about getting a quick, reliable answer.

For many manufacturers, digital interactions look exactly like that. Customers already know what they need. They’ve negotiated pricing and have a repeat buying pattern. They aren’t looking to be marketed to. They’re looking to get a job done.

That’s what the self-service side of the spectrum supports best: making operational information and transactions instantly accessible online.

Common features include:

• Customer-specific pricing and availability
• Order and invoice lookups
• Shipment tracking and payment history
• Simplified reorder workflows and account support tools

The goal here isn’t to create a high-conversion storefront for anonymous traffic. It’s to make life easier for existing customers, dealers, and internal teams who need answers fast.

Moving toward ecommerce: selling and persuasion

As you move across the spectrum, the digital experience becomes less about service and more about persuasion.

This side focuses on helping users browse, compare, and buy. It prioritizes rich product catalogs, personalized content, merchandising, promotions, recommendations, and branded storefront design.

It’s built to attract and convert, not just transact.

Platforms at this end of the spectrum think SAP Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, or Shopify’s B2B capabilities are optimized for digital storefronts and more complex buying journeys across new and existing customers.

But those extra layers of sophistication come with trade-offs: added cost, complexity, and long-term maintenance.

The middle ground: where many manufacturers live

Many manufacturers don’t live at either extreme. They live in the messy middle.

They want customers to place orders online, but they don’t need a consumer-style shopping journey.

They want a clean catalog and intuitive UX, but not a massive merchandising operation.

They want to reduce manual work and phone calls, but without taking on a platform that requires a full-time digital commerce team.

In this middle space, the right solution looks less like portal only or ecommerce only, and more like a hybrid: self-service access to real ERP data, reliable ordering, and enough catalog and UX polish that customers are comfortable transacting on their own.

That’s where platforms like Corevist tend to sit closer to the self-service side, but with ordering and light catalog experiences that support real digital buying behavior without over-rotating into a heavy marketing stack.

The point isn’t that one specific product is the middle. The point is that there is a middle, and for many manufacturers, that’s the most realistic place to design toward.

Ask the right question: how much persuasion?

For manufacturers evaluating options, the decision framework is simple, but powerful: how much persuasion does your business actually need?

If the answer is not much because most buyers already know what they want and value speed and accuracy, then self-service tools should take priority. The job is to help them move quickly, not to sell them on a decision they’ve effectively already made.

If the goal is to attract new buyers, influence product discovery, and create a branded, digitally driven buying experience, then moving further toward ecommerce makes sense. That’s where richer storefronts, content, and merchandising start to earn their keep.

Every inch you move along that spectrum changes what the platform must deliver and what your team has to manage in return. More persuasion usually means more content, more configuration, and more ongoing decisions about how the experience should work.

That’s why manufacturers should start not with a category label, but with the customer motion they’re trying to support. Are customers coming online to browse and be influenced, or to get answers and get work done?

For most manufacturers, the honest answer lives somewhere in the middle. And that middle is often where digital transformation has the best chance of actually sticking.

I run a software company. You should’ve asked these questions before you bought.

When manufacturers evaluate B2B customer portals or SAP ecommerce platforms, the conversation usually starts the same way:

“Let’s look at the Leaders in the Magic Quadrant.”

It feels responsible. Analyst validation. Big logos. Enterprise credibility. Board-safe. It feels like you are de-risking the decision.

But safe is not the same as right.

If your goal is to give existing customers, dealers, distributors, and sales reps fast, accurate, real-time self-service tied directly to SAP, the biggest name in the quadrant may not be the best fit. It may be the most expensive way to solve the wrong problem. You end up buying software that looks great on paper but gets ignored in practice.

Magic Quadrant Leaders are built for a different objective

Most Leaders earned that position by excelling at omnichannel digital commerce. Marketing-driven storefronts, personalization, promotions, content, campaigns, anonymous traffic. They are optimized to attract and convert new buyers, to turn strangers into shoppers and shoppers into orders. This focus pulls your IT resources into managing marketing infrastructure (campaigns, A/B testing, CMS) instead of mission-critical operational data (pricing, availability, credit).

That is a different mission than servicing known customers inside SAP. Post-order self-service is operational. Digital commerce is promotional. Those are not the same problem, and they require different architecture.

If you mix those missions up, you end up buying a marketing machine to solve an operations problem. And then you are surprised when operations quietly pays the price.

Let’s cut to the chase

This is where you should have pushed before signing the SOW. Ask your vendors these questions. The answers will tell you exactly what you need to know about whether you are buying a clean solution or a tangle of dependencies.

• How many systems are involved every time a customer checks pricing, availability, or order status?

One system of truth is ideal. Every additional hop adds latency, integration risk, and one more place where something can be slightly wrong without anyone noticing until your customer calls. If a simple order status check needs to cross three platforms, you are not buying self-service. You are buying a Rube Goldberg machine.

• Is customer and product data replicated, or read live from SAP?

Replication introduces sync jobs, failure points, and timing gaps. You are living in the “almost current” past, hoping the batch jobs ran on time. Live reads reduce drift and eliminate that batch dependency. When SAP changes, your customers see it, and your team does not have to wonder which system is telling the truth.

• What happens if the middleware layer goes down?

Does the portal still function at all? Does anything fail gracefully, or does your entire customer experience hang on a layer your business depends on? If the answer is “the portal is down,” you have introduced a single point of failure between your customers and your revenue.

• How many technical teams are required to implement and maintain this?

Fewer teams means accountability and speed. One team that owns the outcome. Multiple vendors mean coordination overhead, delays, and a lot of “we’re waiting on their team” in your status meetings.

• What measurable business value should we expect in year one?

Look for numbers. CSR workload reduction. Cost-to-serve improvement. Call deflection. Faster order cycles. Fewer status checks. Fewer pricing disputes. If the answer you get is a list of capabilities instead of outcomes, you are being sold a toolbox, not a result.

• What is the ongoing cost to operate this beyond license fees?

Integration maintenance. Data sync management. Upgrade coordination. Vendor dependencies. Those do not show up in the pricing table, but they show up in your P&L and your people’s calendars. Total cost is driven by structural complexity, not subscription price.

These are not academic questions. They define how much complexity you are introducing and how much risk you are accepting. If you do not like the answers, you already know what that means. You are about to buy a problem your team will carry.

The hidden tax no one talks about

The architecture always looks clean in the sales deck. Three boxes. Clean arrows. “Integrated.” No friction. No latency. No edge cases.

In reality, every extra layer becomes something your team has to live with.

When pricing drifts, your CSR owns it. They explain why what the customer saw online is not what shows up on the invoice. When availability lags, your rep double-checks it and quietly reverts to email and spreadsheets because they trust their inbox more than the portal.

When the portal says one thing and SAP says another, your manager explains it. Over and over again. No one calls the middleware vendor. They call you. They call your CSRs. They call your sales team.

The people you pay to serve customers become human APIs, manually stitching together what your “integrated” architecture could not keep in sync. That is the hidden tax of layered architecture. Time your team spends reconciling systems is time they are not serving customers or closing deals.

Three o’clock on a Friday

Picture this. It is three o’clock on a Friday. A key customer logs in to check an order that has to ship today. The portal shows “Confirmed.”

In SAP, the order is on hold due to a credit issue updated earlier that day. The replication process stalled at noon. The portal never updated. To your customer, you gave them a green light.

The customer calls your CSR. They are not calling to chat. They are calling because your systems do not agree. Now your team is explaining why the system cannot be trusted, why “Confirmed” does not mean confirmed, and why they need to wait while someone checks the backend.

This is what happens when architecture choices show up in operations. The diagram becomes the mess in your day. And it happens at exactly the worst moments. End of day. End of month. End of quarter.

What this really means for your business

Step back from the diagrams and look at what happens on the floor.

If the portal is slow, your team answers the phone.
If pricing is wrong, your team fixes it.
If availability is unclear, your reps start emailing.
If data is out of sync, someone in operations explains it.

If the portal is confusing, your sales reps stop using it.
If your dealers cannot get accurate pricing, they call your inside team.
If distributors cannot see real availability, they hold orders or over-order.
If order status is unclear, they escalate.

Every extra system shows up as extra work. More calls. More manual fixes. More escalations. More “let me check on that.” The portal was supposed to reduce workload and accelerate orders. Instead, your team becomes the workaround.

The only question that matters

You can compare feature lists. You can stack up roadmaps, analyst badges, and logos.

But the only question that matters is simple:

Does this platform remove friction for your customers, dealers, distributors, and reps, or does it create new work for your team?

If it removes friction, your people will feel it. Calls go down. Errors drop. Orders move faster. If it creates work, they will feel that too. And they will spend their days compensating for a decision that looked safe on a slide.

I run a software company. I still buy software. I know what it feels like when you get this wrong, and who pays the price.

Next time you are in the market for a portal, start with these questions, not the quadrant.

Your customers and your CSRs will thank you.

SAP Already Knows When Orders Can Ship. Why Are Customers Still Calling?

SAP ATP (Available to Promise) is SAP’s availability check. It tells what the business can actually commit to for a specific material, plant, quantity, and requested date by evaluating relevant stock, receipts, and issues within a configured scope of check—not just today’s on-hand inventory.

In B2B self-service portals and eCommerce, ATP is what makes availability credible online: buyers care about a shippable quantity and a believable date. As more buying journeys become rep-free in 2026, those answers need to be fast, consistent, and explainable.

What SAP ATP is

In SAP, ATP commonly refers to the availability check logic that determines whether requirements can be covered by stock or planned receipts, and when.

Conceptually, ATP is an order promising capability. It uses rule driven inclusion and exclusion of stock, receipts, and issues to compute what is actually promiseable for a requested date, then returns confirmed quantities and dates that can flow into order scheduling.

For a deeper breakdown on ATP in SAP, check out our blog here.

What is different about ATP in 2026

Customer expectations for instant answers

By 2026, buyer expectation in many B2B segments is that basic ordering questions are answered immediately during browsing and checkout.

That expectation does not stop at price and contract terms. It extends to:

• Can it ship
• When
• How much

More volatility (allocations, partial confirmations, constrained supply)

Volatility shows up as frequent reschedules, allocations, partial confirmations, substitutions, and backorders.

These are not corner cases anymore. They are the cases that drive customer frustration if the portal experience is built on a simplistic “inventory equals availability” assumption.

The concept that causes most online availability problems: scope of check

The key SAP concept is the scope of the availability check.

SAP defines scope via configuration and master data, particularly the pairing of:

• Checking group (typically maintained in the material master)
• Checking rule (typically maintained in configuration)

That pairing determines which stocks, receipts, and issues are considered. Two screens can both “show availability” and still answer different questions if they use different checking rules or include different MRP elements.

Manufacturing flavored example

A plant may have 500 units physically in unrestricted stock today. The same SKU may also have open sales orders, production orders, reservations, stock transfers, or planned receipts that SAP considers within the chosen scope of check.

SAP’s ATP check can be configured to consider these MRP elements, so the promiseable quantity for next week can be far less than 500 even though the warehouse count is unchanged.

Best practices for handling ATP in SAP

The goal is not more ATP complexity. It is disciplined ATP that is explainable, performant, and consistent across channels.

Best practices checklist

• Treat scope of check as a published contract. Document which stocks, receipts, and issues are included for each scenario, and align the portal’s ATP checks to the same checking group plus checking rule combination used for order confirmation.
• Standardize the checking rule used by external channels. If the portal and Customer Service use different checking rules, the same SKU can return different promise dates and quantities, creating reconciliation work and disputes.
• Make lead time governance non optional. Availability dates depend on maintained lead times (including replenishment lead time where used, and fallbacks like in house production time or planned delivery time). Assign owners, review cadence, and exception reporting.
• Use allocation intentionally when supply is constrained. If limited supply is distributed by customer, region, or channel, model it with governed allocation logic instead of manual overrides so the portal does not promise what the business will not honor.
• Separate browse signals from checkout confirmation. Show indicative availability during browsing, but run an authoritative ATP check at checkout and place the order immediately after so the promise the buyer sees matches what SAP will confirm.
• Design for partials and staged dates. ATP confirmations can split quantities and dates (schedule line behavior). Portal UX and integration should support partial confirmations instead of forcing a single number and single date.
• Make ATP results auditable. Log key inputs and outputs for external checks (material, plant, requested quantity and date, ship to context, rule intent, returned confirmation) so disputes are explainable and fixes are data driven.

How manufacturers expose ATP in B2B portals and ecommerce

There is no universally correct pattern. A few patterns recur because they map cleanly to user expectations and SAP realities.

Pattern A: Show “available now” only

When it fits: High volume MTS items with stable supply, low variability, and short lead times. Also useful when availability is mostly a warehouse question rather than a production question.

Risks: “Available now” can be misread as “guaranteed.” If the portal is reading a simplified stock number, it may diverge from the promiseable quantity computed by ATP scope rules.

UX guidance: Use language that states what is being shown, such as “Available to ship from stock,” and validate at checkout.

Pattern B: Show “available now” plus “next availability date”

When it fits: Mixed MTS and replenishment environments where backorders are normal but lead times are reasonably predictable.

Risks: The “next date” can be sensitive to lead time maintenance and replenishment lead time settings. If lead times are poorly governed, the portal will communicate incorrect expectations.

UX guidance: Display two numbers, available now and available by date, and add a short note for manufactured items indicating dates are subject to confirmation at order placement.

Pattern C: Show date ranges or tiered availability

When it fits: Constrained supply, long lead times, frequent rescheduling, or MTO products where exact dates are less credible until the order is created.

Risks: Too much nuance can confuse buyers and raise support load.

UX guidance: Provide a small set of tiers, such as “Ships in 1 to 3 days,” “Ships in 1 to 2 weeks,” “Ships in 3 to 5 weeks,” backed by an ATP rule set and refreshed periodically. Still run a true ATP check at checkout to generate exact confirmations.

Pattern D: Show availability by ship to, plant, or DC logic

When it fits: Multiple plants, regional DCs, dealer networks, ship to specific constraints. Common when freight policy or hazardous material constraints limit sourcing options.

Risks: The same SKU can have different availability by plant. Users will see contradictory answers if the UI does not make plant or DC context visible. Using the wrong plant in portal calls is a classic integration defect.

UX guidance: Make ship to location explicit (“Availability for Ship To X”) and provide a change ship to control. Silent defaulting is a support ticket generator.

Pattern E: Role based visibility (dealer vs customer vs internal)

When it fits: Tiered channels where internal users need deeper detail, dealers may have allocations, and end customers should see a simpler promise.

Risks: If role based logic is implemented only in the portal and not aligned to underlying promise rules, it becomes unauditable and inconsistent.

UX guidance: Use role based views to change display detail, not to invent separate promise math. Internal roles can see schedule line style breakdowns while external roles see summarized tiers.

Architectural tradeoffs worth stating plainly

Real time ATP is the gold standard for self service ordering because it keeps the portal’s promise aligned with what SAP will actually confirm at order creation.

The tradeoff is not that real time is too slow. The tradeoff is that naive implementations make too many calls in the wrong moments.

Real time becomes expensive when availability is calculated per SKU, per row, per scroll.
Real time becomes practical when checks are batched, triggered by intent, and scoped to the smallest meaningful set of products and ship to contexts.

Cached or staged availability is a compromise, not a shortcut. It can be acceptable for browse flows, but it must be governed with explicit freshness windows and a final authoritative check at checkout.

The portal should not simulate ATP with its own math. If the portal calculates availability independently, it will drift from SAP’s checking rules, product allocation behavior, and lead time settings, especially under volatility.

The hard part: setting expectations in the UI

The goal is not to expose everything SAP knows. The goal is to expose what a buyer needs to make a decision while keeping promises credible.

What to display: numbers, dates, or ranges

• Use a number when supply is stable and confirmations rarely split.
• Use dates when the business can reliably commit to a ship date.
• Use ranges when variability is high or the product is make to order.

SAP schedule lines can represent partial deliveries across dates and quantities. If the UI insists on one date, it will hide partial confirmation reality and push complexity into customer service.

Language that reduces support tickets

• “Available to ship” rather than “in stock” if the promise is based on ATP
• “Estimated ship date” when the business uses lead time based confirmations
• “Confirmed at checkout” when browse uses near real time data
• Avoid “guaranteed” unless inventory is intentionally reserved or a hard commit is enforced at quote time

When to show “call to confirm” vs when to commit

“Call to confirm” should be reserved for cases where the portal cannot credibly compute a promise, such as engineered to order products, highly configured assemblies, or constraints outside the modeled scope.

Overusing “call to confirm” defeats self service.

A more constructive compromise is request a quote for MTO and complex products, and commit at checkout for standard catalog items.

The framework that matters online: ATP accuracy vs ATP access

Most manufacturers invest in ATP accuracy and stop there.

Online ordering exposes the second half:

ATP accuracy is whether SAP can produce a credible promise result.
ATP access is whether the buyer can retrieve that promise result at the moment of ordering.

If ATP is not accessible in the channel where orders are placed, customers keep calling.

The next step: make SAP the only answer

Most ATP problems are not really ATP problems. They are channel problems: one set of rules in SAP, a different representation online, and a steady drip of exceptions when the two do not match.

The cleanest next step is to stop maintaining a parallel availability story and let SAP be the single source of promise in the customer experience.

That is the lane Corevist plays in: an SAP native self service portal that surfaces ATP, along with pricing and order status, directly from ECC or S 4HANA in real time. The point is not “more data.” The point is fewer mismatches, fewer reconciliations, and fewer touches for teams that currently have to explain why the website and SAP disagree.

I Run a Software Company. Your CSRs Are Paying the Price.

In my last two posts, I made two admissions.

First: I run a software company. And I still buy software. I don’t build everything. Sometimes the smartest move is to buy what already works.

Second: I run a software company. And I don’t always recommend us. Not every problem is a fit. Define the problem first. Then pick the tool.

Here’s the third.

I run a software company. And I don’t trust what my industry is doing to your customer service teams.

If you lead customer service for a manufacturer running SAP, this probably feels familiar. Reps are overwhelmed. The tech stack keeps growing. Turnover keeps rising.

The numbers are ugly. Over 60% of call center agents report burnout risk. Many B2B contact centers live in a world where annual turnover is normal, not alarming. The work is high volume. The systems are fragmented. The day is constant context switching.

At the same time, expectations keep climbing. AI. Omnichannel. Digital transformation.

SAP’s own guidance on AI in service includes a point that should not be controversial, but somehow is: AI should be anchored in real workflows, not deployed for its own sake. The fact that this warning needs to be said at all should give anyone in leadership a pause.

I’ve sat in the boardrooms where “platform expansion” is the growth lever and ARR is the headline. I’ve also noticed what is usually missing from the slide deck.

Nobody asks what a CSR’s screen looks like at 10:17 a.m. when a dealer calls and says, “Where’s my order?”

That is the question that matters.

The hidden tax on the front line

In a typical SAP centric service environment, answering one basic order status question can mean jumping across a handful of systems: SAP, CRM, Email, carrier sites, a portal that may or may not be current. 

So CSRs become human APIs. They translate and reconcile information all day, then get measured on speed.

Research is consistent on the pattern: fragmented tool stacks and cognitive overload show up as longer handle times, higher error rates, and lower satisfaction. Context switching is not just annoying. It is expensive. And the cost compounds into stress, rework, and operational debt.

Vendors celebrate omnichannel. Your team experiences omni-swivel-chair.

Now layer in AI.

Chatbots. AI agents. Auto summaries. Suggested replies.

A lot of companies talk about this as relief. But many teams experience it as supervision. Someone still has to verify the output, correct it, and clean up the edge cases. Nearly 80% of workers using generative AI say it has increased their workload because they spend time reviewing and correcting AI output.

If AI does not reduce the number of systems a rep touches to resolve a ticket, it is not innovation. It is noise.

If it doesn’t eliminate a step, don’t take it

Here’s the rule I give service leaders when someone proposes a new tool.

For every system you add, tell me what step disappears.

A properly integrated SAP self-service portal should allow customers to:

Check order status directly against SAP.
Retrieve invoices without emailing a CSR.
Confirm pricing from the system of record.

Studies on well designed self service consistently show routine inquiry volume can drop dramatically, often 50 to 70 percent, when customers can reliably get answers on their own.

If the stack only grows, the burden grows.

If a project does not move first contact resolution, handle time, CSAT, or deflection, it is decoration.

And since I’m the CEO of a software company, I’ll say it plainly:

If we cannot show a believable path to improving those numbers, you should not buy from us.

When I walk away

There are times I tell a prospect no. Not because the software is bad. Because I’ve seen the same failure pattern too many times.

I walk away when there is no service leader insisting on fewer system touchpoints, and the initiative is being driven as a technology project.

I walk away when SAP master data is a mess and nobody is willing to own the cleanup. A portal can only expose what the ERP can support. Bad data does not become trustworthy just because it has a nicer UI.

I walk away when the organization is not willing to retire legacy tools and enforce a new workflow. If everything stays, nothing changes.

There are times when portals “go live” and call volume go up because customers didn’t trust the information. That outcome is worse than doing nothing. It adds cost and disappointment at the same time.

Good software is subtractive. It removes steps, reduces screens, and makes work simpler.

CSRs live with the consequences of every system decision.

Make sure the software does too.

2026 Top B2B Self-Service Portals for Mid-Market Manufacturers

Every year, the Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce Platforms highlights leaders in digital commerce. The research is thorough and stands on its own.

It is also built for the category Gartner defines as “digital commerce,” meaning interactive self service or assisted buying journeys that include storefronts, catalogs, search, carts, checkout, and fully priced orders. In other words, the workflow of discovery to persuasion to conversion.

But across sales conversations, implementation projects, and support tickets, we consistently see a different pattern. Many mid-market manufacturers are not trying to perfect digital persuasion. They are trying to solve post order visibility and transactional servicing: order status, invoice access, pricing accuracy, dealer enablement, and CSR workload reduction.

That is a different problem.

To Gartner’s credit, the report itself calls this out. It notes the rise of comprehensive customer portals designed to support postsales interactions such as service requests, claims management, order tracking, and personalized support across the customer life cycle.

So we decided to have some fun and put a simple question to the test: which vendors most clearly position themselves for ERP centered operational self service, not just digital selling.

Instead of debating internally, we structured the question and asked two large language models to score vendors based strictly on what each vendor chooses to emphasize on its public website.

We added one constraint that often gets glossed over: the ERP.

For manufacturers, the ERP is the system of record. Pricing, inventory, order status, invoices, and customer hierarchies live there. Whether a portal succeeds often comes down to how it treats that system.

When a portal is built around the ERP as the source of truth, pricing reflects contract reality, inventory reflects actual availability, and order history reflects what truly shipped. When it is layered on top as a commerce front end, data must be replicated, synchronized, or translated. That can work, but it introduces latency and reconciliation. Over time, small mismatches become service tickets. Service tickets become manual work. Manual work erodes the ROI the portal was meant to deliver.

So the architectural question becomes critical: is the portal built around the ERP as the source of truth, or layered on top as a commerce front end?

That distinction shaped the scoring.

What follows is a positioning analysis, not a technical architecture audit. It evaluates how clearly vendors speak to ERP centered operational self service use cases in their public positioning.

A quick note on scope

Gartner tracks more than 160 vendors in this market and evaluated 19 vendors in the Magic Quadrant. The report also states that exclusion does not imply a lack of viability. In many cases, it reflects inclusion criteria tied to revenue scale, customer counts, geography, and growth thresholds.

This scorecard is not trying to replicate Gartner. It is a different lens on a different decision: operational self service portals for manufacturers, anchored in the ERP. Readers who want the full Magic Quadrant analysis can download the official report directly from SAP’s website here.

The prompt we gave the LLMs

We selected capabilities that directly affect post order visibility, transactional accuracy, and ERP centered servicing because those are the constraints manufacturers raise most often.

“You are a B2B portal expert advising mid market manufacturers.

Assume the ERP system is the system of record.

Score the following vendors on whether they clearly offer the following capabilities based on their public websites and product positioning.

Scoring rules
1 = Vendor explicitly claims the capability in portal or operational self service terms on its public site
0 = Not clearly marketed or only implied

If a capability is only implied, score it 0. Only assign 1 when the vendor’s own site clearly describes it in portal or operational self service language.

Capabilities
Real time ERP integration (system of record positioning, not generic “integration”)
Contract pricing
Account based pricing
Customer hierarchies and multi role access
Order history and reorder
Invoice and document retrieval
Shipment tracking
RFQ or quoting
Dealer or distributor enablement
Explicit “B2B portal” positioning
Fast launch or low complexity positioning
Operational self service focus for known customers rather than merchandising narrative

Vendors offerings evaluated:

Corevist
SAP B2B Self-Service Portal
Virto Portal
Salesforce B2B Commerce + Experience Cloud
Adobe Commerce
commercetools
Shopify Plus

This framework evaluates clarity of positioning, not total feature breadth, scalability, or what could be built with customization.” 

For readers who want to see the prompt executed live, the full walkthrough is available here: https://youtu.be/IpjwYjTwORY

2026 B2B Self-Service Portal Scorecard

Vendors receive a score of 0 where ERP system of record positioning or operational self service emphasis is not explicit in public messaging, even if the capability could be built through integration. Vendors receive a score of 1 where ERP system-of-record positioning or operational self-service emphasis is explicitly reflected in public messaging. Treat this as a lens on positioning, not as the final word on architecture.

What the LLMs revealed

1. Portal messaging matters
   Only a subset of vendors explicitly lead with “B2B portal” language. SAP and Virto clearly market portal solutions by name. Others emphasize B2B commerce, digital commerce, or customer experience. When the primary problem is post order servicing for known customers, that distinction matters.
2. ERP depth is the divider
   ERP integration is not optional for manufacturers. Commerce platforms can integrate with ERP, but portal centric solutions tend to frame ERP as the system of record and build the experience around it. That stance affects pricing integrity, order accuracy, shipment visibility, and customer trust, which directly impact cost to serve.
3. Operational self service is a distinct category
   Platforms like Salesforce, Adobe, commercetools, and Shopify are strong digital commerce engines. For organizations prioritizing acquisition, merchandising, and digital experience breadth, those platforms may be the right fit. Operational self service for existing customers is simply not the dominant story in their positioning.

Vendor breakdown

Corevist — 12/12
Public positioning emphasizes ERP centered self service and post order workflows, including pricing, invoices, order history, and dealer enablement. Under this scoring method, the messaging maps cleanly to the criteria.

SAP B2B Self-Service Portal — 11/12
Explicitly marketed as a B2B self service portal, with clear ERP system of record narrative and strong coverage of account, orders, and invoice oriented servicing. Portal capabilities may be evaluated in the context of SAP’s broader commerce and experience stack depending on deployment approach.

Virto Portal — 9/12
Clearly markets a B2B portal solution with account structures and RFQ workflows. ERP integration is supported, though ERP as system of record is less emphasized in the public narrative than portal language itself.

Salesforce B2B Commerce + Experience Cloud — 5/12
Strong B2B commerce capabilities and portal infrastructure, with messaging centered on commerce, experience, and CRM driven workflows. ERP anchored operational servicing can be delivered, but it is not the core public story.

Adobe Commerce — 5/12
Robust commerce and experience orientation with B2B features like quoting and account based pricing. Operational self service is possible, but public positioning is more strongly tied to experience and merchandising.

commercetools — 4/12
Composable commerce infrastructure that can support complex B2B use cases with the right orchestration. Its public story reads more like platform building blocks than a packaged operational portal.

Shopify Plus B2B — 5/12
B2B capability layered onto a commerce foundation with strengths in speed and usability. Public positioning remains more storefront and merchandising oriented than ERP centered servicing.

Why this matters

Most leading digital commerce platforms can support elements of B2B self service. Far fewer position themselves as ERP centered operational portals for known customers.

That difference is not about capability. It is about orientation.

Manufacturers evaluating vendors should ask:

Are we optimizing for discovery, persuasion, and conversion?
Or are we optimizing for post order visibility and transactional servicing?

Both are valid strategies. They are not the same category.

The real question for 2026

The Magic Quadrant evaluates digital commerce platforms.

This exercise evaluates operational self service portals built around the ERP as the system of record.

If your primary constraint is CSR workload, order accuracy, and ERP visibility, that distinction will drive ROI more than merchandising capability alone.

How to use this scorecard

This scorecard reflects vendor positioning, not a complete technical audit. Use it as a starting point for deeper evaluation.

If ERP integration is critical in your environment, consider asking:

• Are prices and inventory read directly from ERP in real time, or synchronized to the platform
• What is the latency between order submission and ERP confirmation
• Is the integration prebuilt and certified, or custom

If post order servicing is central to your goals, consider asking:

• Is there a prebuilt workspace for CSRs, dealers, or account managers
• Can customers reorder entire past transactions easily
• How are contract pricing and customer hierarchies enforced at runtime

I run a software company. Not every problem needs my software.

Let’s start with the obvious: I run a software company. We design and sell enterprise software. I have a perspective on how companies choose platforms. Some of that comes from building. A lot of it comes from watching customers live with the consequences of those decisions.

There is a natural assumption that every vendor believes their product fits every situation. In practice, some of our best sales conversations end with us recommending a different product, because not every problem is a Corevist problem.

If the goal is running complex, marketing-driven storefronts, a top digital commerce platform – the kind frequently found in analyst quadrant reports – is often the right choice. These systems support brand storytelling, content, product discovery, promotions, campaigns, and anonymous browsing. They are built to attract and convert new buyers. I even keep a short list of the ones I tend to recommend.

However, with these platforms, everyday post-order interactions run on a much heavier system than the task requires.

Commerce platforms acquire customers. Operational systems service customers.
Those are different problems.

The Influence of the Implementation Partner

Many of these projects begin as digital transformation initiatives led by an implementation partner. Those teams specialize in customer experience platforms, storefront design, and marketing workflows, so the problem is naturally framed in those terms.

That is not wrong. It is a different lens.

When you solve a service problem with a commerce platform, complexity follows. Organizations implement a digital experience platform to answer order and account questions that already live inside the ERP. The result becomes expensive to maintain and slow to adapt.

Good partners solve the problems they are best equipped to solve. The important step is confirming the problem before choosing the platform.

When a Portal Clearly Beats a Storefront

Most companies buy commerce platforms to solve a service problem. If your customers already exist, you are not trying to persuade them, you are trying to operate efficiently. The fastest way to reduce service cost is to stop mediating information the ERP already knows.

Orders arrive through phone calls, emails, spreadsheets, and EDI. Status lives in the ERP. Pricing is complicated. When customer service teams spend their day answering questions like these, the challenge is operational rather than commercial:

Where is my order?
Can I get a copy of the invoice?
Did pricing change?
What shipped?
What is backordered?
Can I place or repeat this order without starting from scratch?

These are not merchandising problems. They are operational ones.

You do not need campaigns or personalization engines to answer order and account questions reliably. You need secure, accurate exposure of ERP data with minimal latency and minimal maintenance. This shifts routine questions away from customer service and back to the customer.

That is where we operate.

The Hybris Replacement Conversation

In mature SAP environments, another pattern appears. A company implemented a commerce platform years ago for digital commerce. Over time, usage shifted. The platform now serves mostly logged-in users checking orders, invoices, shipments, and pricing rather than anonymous shopping. The system still functions but feels oversized for the job and expensive to evolve.

In those cases, the problem is no longer digital commerce. It is customer self service.

Replacing one commerce engine with another rarely fixes that. Simplifying the architecture usually does.

A Practical Rule of Thumb

If your initiative starts in marketing, you probably want a commerce platform in the lead.
If it starts in customer service or operations, you probably do not.

Sometimes the right answer is a pure commerce platform.
Sometimes it is Corevist.
Sometimes it is something else entirely.

As the old saying goes, “Never use a cannon to kill a mosquito.” The mistake is not choosing the wrong product. It is solving the wrong problem.

I run a software company. And I still buy software.

Let’s start with the obvious: I run a software company. We design and sell enterprise software. So yes, I have a perspective on the “build vs. buy” debate—one informed as much by buying as by building.

There is a well-known line that says, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Some will argue that this perspective is shaped by that reality.

That is fair.

It is also why I try to be precise about what I am and am not arguing. Over time, I’ve learned that the line between a great internal prototype and a durable production system can look deceptively thin. That is where even capable organizations find themselves tested.

A Demo Is Not a System

Modern tools—AI, low-code platforms, integration frameworks—have made experimentation faster and cheaper than ever. That is progress. Teams can learn quickly, visualize ideas, and test assumptions at record speed. Used well, prototypes sharpen thinking and reduce waste.

The challenge is what happens after the early excitement. A proof of concept that performs beautifully in a controlled setting can mask the work still ahead. Real systems must endure bad data, evolving security standards, staff turnover, regulatory surprises, and growth that never fits the plan. Logging, access controls, auditability, backups, and governance are not glamorous—but they are what make software sustainable. The best innovators know that building is only half the journey. Support, compliance, and stewardship define the other half.

The Hidden Cost of Permanent Ownership

Consider a mid-sized manufacturer that built its own order-entry and reporting portal five years ago to avoid paying a software vendor. At the time, it worked well. Sales reps could place orders, customers could check status, and management had visibility into backlog and pricing.

Today, the original architect is gone. The system struggles with S/4HANA upgrades. New compliance and export-control requirements are difficult to support. Pricing rules live in undocumented scripts. Integrations break during every ERP change. The remaining IT team avoids touching the code unless absolutely necessary.

The company did not eliminate cost. It converted a license fee into a permanent, underfunded operational risk.

When you replace commercial platforms with internal systems, you are not making a short-term decision. You are committing to years of maintenance, security updates, compliance reviews, integrations, and user support. You are committing to fund that work long after the original excitement has faded.

In the first year, ownership feels empowering. You control the roadmap. You avoid license fees. You move quickly. In year three or five, it feels different. Key developers have moved on. Documentation is incomplete. Security standards have changed. Regulators ask new questions. Customers expect higher reliability. At that point, “we built this ourselves” stops being a point of pride and becomes a permanent obligation.

Owning software is not wrong. In fact, when a system is part of your intellectual property—the unique element that delivers your core value—building is often mandatory.

Owning it forever, without a clear strategic reason, usually is.

What Business Are We Really In?

Every company faces this question eventually. Are we a manufacturer, distributor, logistics provider—or a technology company at heart? Most successful firms thrive by excelling in a narrow band of capabilities, not by mastering every layer of technology beneath them.

Building internal platforms is a form of vertical integration. Sometimes it deepens advantage. Sometimes it diffuses it. Owning software means owning security, compliance, uptime, support, governance, and succession. Those responsibilities create durable capability only when they reinforce the company’s strategic core. The right question is not whether you can build more internally. It is whether this system gives you a market advantage or proprietary capability you could not buy—and whether it makes you stronger three to five years from now.

Closing

I run a software company, and I still buy software.

Because focus beats pride.

We invest deeply in what we do best: delivering reliable, SAP-integrated self-service portals that make manufacturers easier to do business with. The rest, we trust to partners who bring their own excellence to the table.

The real competitive advantage is not found in avoiding a license fee. It is found in the sustained ability to execute your core strategy. Building for the sake of ownership is a slow diversion. Partnering for excellence is a permanent accelerator.

Great companies are not defined by how much they build.
They are defined by what they choose to master.

They experiment.
They partner.
They buy wisely.
And they deliver results.

First published Nov 16, 2023. Last updated Feb 5, 2026.

Definition: What is SAP ATP?

SAP ATP (Available to promise) is a real-time availability check in SAP SD and S/4HANA that determines whether a requested product quantity can be confirmed for delivery on a specific date. It evaluates current stock, planned receipts, and existing commitments to provide an accurate order confirmation.

In simple terms, ATP tells you: Can I fulfill this order, how much can I deliver, and when?

SAP ATP in 60 Seconds

• Definition: ATP (Available-to-Promise) is an availability check that confirms whether an order can be fulfilled based on current and future inventory.
• Where it’s used: Sales orders, delivery processing, and order fulfillment workflows in SAP SD and S/4HANA.
• Why it matters: It prevents over-promising, improves customer satisfaction, and ensures accurate delivery dates.

What an ATP check evaluates:

• Current stock
• Planned receipts (purchase orders / production orders)
• Existing commitments (sales orders / reservations)

Result: A confirmed quantity and delivery date, reflected in SAP as a schedule line confirmation.

SAP ATP Examples

Scenario 1: Order Quantity Exceeds Available Stock

• Customer order = 50 units
• Available stock (ATP) = 10 units
• Remaining quantity = 40 units

ATP Check Result:

• 10 units confirmed for immediate delivery
• 40 units confirmed for a future date based on planned receipts and lead times

Scenario 2: No Stock Available, Future Supply Exists

• Customer order = 200 units
• Current stock = 0
• Planned production = 200 units in 10 days

ATP Check Result:

• 0 units confirmed today
• 200 units confirmed for delivery in 10 days

In SAP, these confirmations are reflected in schedule lines, which define the confirmed quantities and delivery dates for each order.

SAP ATP Best Practices

• Use the correct ATP check configuration
  (check group and check rule) to align with your business processes
• Ensure inventory data accuracy
  across stock, receipts, and reservations
• Regularly review backorder processing
  to reallocate inventory efficiently
• Monitor schedule line confirmations
  to manage partial deliveries and customer expectations
• Avoid over-customization that breaks standard
  ATP logic and increases maintenance complexity
• Align ATP behavior with customer service goals
  (lead times, partial shipments, delivery commitments)
• Leverage S/4HANA ATP (aATP) for advanced capabilities like product allocation and supply protection

SAP ATP FAQs

SAP ATP is a powerful availability check and calculation, and its exact form will be unique to your ERP system.

SAP ATP requires you to model your entire supply chain and manufacturing process so the ATP check can accurately evaluate availability. Your SAP ERP system has to re-run the calculations of that model every time you get an order, in the context of all the orders that you have. It’s phenomenal to think about how SAP ATP calculation works.

The B2B industry is already struggling with the tradeoffs associated with “never say no.” That commitment means you have to have inventory, which costs money—and potentially, inventory can go obsolete.

SAP ATP allows a manufacturer to stay as lean as possible. It also forces the manufacturer to rethink any factors that aren’t supporting lean and just-in-time manufacturing.

How does SAP calculate available to promise?

Your ERP system uses a highly complex formula to perform an ATP availability check and calculate available-to-promise quantities. This formula takes many factors into account, including:

• All outstanding purchase orders to suppliers for parts and/or ingredients of the finished product.
• The manufacturing cycle time, how long it takes to convert inbound supplies to a product that’s available to promise to a customer.
• How you allocate product to competing customers.

Should all customers see the same SAP ATP calculation for a product?

This is a great question, and there’s no right answer. Every company (and every customer of that company) is different. This can become an issue in e-commerce if your SAP ATP calculation isn’t built to model smart management practices.

For example, it might seem like a good idea to show the same available-to-promise figure to every customer. But what if you sell out of the product before your biggest customer can put their quarterly order in? That’s not smart management. Better to make your smaller customer wait, rather than risk upsetting your biggest spender.

Luckily, there are strategies and technology available for manufacturers who need to hold back when there’s limited inventory. The key is to understand your customer landscape and use the tools at your disposal to allocate product to the highest-value customers first, often through ATP allocation logic and backorder processing.

How do different companies handle SAP ATP calculations?

Every company has different needs when it comes to SAP ATP. For example, in the B2C sector, Amazon has developed an interesting workaround for the available-to-promise problem. They show the inventory for all their products as, “Usually ships in X days,” instead of exposing a precise ATP confirmation. That could be 1 day, 3-5 days, or something similar. “Usually” is the key word here. It has all kinds of contingency baked into it. The whole phrase, “usually ships in X days,” is a euphemism for, “the product is in inventory (or we can get it quickly), we are going to promise it to you, but we reserve the right to send you a follow-up email saying that we couldn’t get it to you on time and it will be delayed.”

In the B2B sector, one of our clients takes a different approach. Their SAP B2B e-commerce website says, “Order by 5 today, and you’ll get it tomorrow.” The company carries everything in inventory. Of course, this model comes with its own challenges. The company can only fulfill their delivery promise about 85% of the time. But they’ve committed to this model for larger reasons that make sense in their industry, and they’re always trying to get that number to 90, 92, 93%.

In other words, they’re using available to promise to drive their customer service excellence.

What SAP ATP configuration is right for my company?

As you can tell by now, available to promise configuration is totally dependent on your industry, your company, your products, and your customers. It’s helpful to think of SAP ATP configurations as falling on a spectrum.

For instance, brick-and-mortar retail provides us with one extreme on the spectrum. If you’re shopping for a pair of jeans in your size and the retailer doesn’t have that size in stock, you don’t buy them that day, and the store doesn’t get the sale. That’s lost revenue. You’re not going to sit at the register and say, those are the pants that I want. When they come in, call me and I’ll buy them. Available to promise is useless to you because you want your jeans now!

There is one exception to this rule in B2C—the product that is very unique. The further away the product is from a commodity, the more the consumer is willing to endure what is ultimately the far end of this spectrum: the dreaded black hole of “backordered.”

Somewhere between the two extremes, between “in inventory” and “backordered,” you have available to promise. SAP ATP helps you strike that balance between fulfilling customer expectations and working with the reality of your supply chain.

How does SAP ATP affect eCommerce sales?

Generally speaking, the more accurate your SAP ATP calculation is, the better that product will perform in ecommerce, since the web store tells customers exactly what to expect. This matters more than it used to: McKinsey’s latest B2B Pulse Survey notes that for B2B companies offering digital commerce, online channels now account for more than one-third of total revenue, which means inaccuracies in things like available-to-promise no longer just create operational headaches, they directly affect buying behavior at scale. That’s why it’s important to display accurate ATP confirmations in ecommerce. In Corevist Commerce Cloud, we provide functionality that performs a real-time ATP availability check to surface accurate availability and pricing without placing an order.

In some industries, this SAP ATP calculation is critical to closing the sale. If the customer doesn’t get a good answer, he or she will go somewhere else to buy it—especially if the product is highly commoditized. Here, lack of ATP in ecommerce can create friction for your customers. It could even cost you the sale.

Whenever we implement a new e-commerce website, we have many discussions with our client. We ask a thorough set of questions to help our client think through their policy for SAP ATP in ecommerce. The questions include:

• What are you going to do about inventory? Show it? Hide it? Give actual quantities that are in inventory? Give visual signals like green/yellow/red to give qualitative information about inventory?
• Can you run SAP ATP checks in SAP, and if so, do you want to display ATP confirmations in ecommerce? And if you want to display it, do you want to break up a line item into the various SAP ATP quantities and dates?
• If SAP can’t come up with a calculation for ATP and the product goes on backlog, do you want to take that order or not? And what message do you want to give your customer?

How do shifting tariff policies affect ATP?

Shifting tariff policies have made supply and replenishment less predictable for many manufacturers. In 2025, the effective U.S. tariff rate climbed into the high-teens, reaching levels not seen in decades after years of relatively low duties. Those changes affect where materials are sourced, how quickly they can be replenished, and how much inventory manufacturers are willing to hold. As a result, available-to-promise increasingly reflects more than what is physically on hand. In practice, manufacturers often cap the quantity that is promisable, prioritize certain customers or contracts directly within ATP, and avoid committing inventory tied to uncertain or higher-cost replenishment. When ATP logic doesn’t reflect those constraints, manufacturers are more likely to over-promise, expedite at a loss, or rely on manual intervention to protect key customer relationships.

What if I can’t provide an ATP date from SAP?

Different industries will handle the lack of an SAP ATP date in different ways. For example, one of our clients sells soda ash to farmers as a supplement for cows. If a factory goes down for a week, due to an explosion, it doesn’t produce any inventory. What happens if a farmer logs in to the website, in desperate need of soda ash, and sees no inventory available to promise? It’s a frustrating and stressful moment for the farmer. He needs a truckload this week. The product is backlogged, and the manufacturer doesn’t know when it will be available? What’s the farmer supposed to do?

If you can’t provide an available to promise date, the key is to communicate the situation with a friendly message. When your SAP-integrated ecommerce website senses that an ATP isn’t available in SAP, you can display a message that says, “Please call your Customer Service Representative for details about this product.”

Here’s another example of why SAP ATP matters in ecommerce. Some of our clients have multiple warehouses. They anticipate that at times, the customer’s “facing plant” may not have the required inventory. In that case, we serially check multiple plants and provide the customer with choices as to what he would like to do. This is a complex topic unto itself, and we covered it in this post–Multiple Line Items from Multiple Warehouses.

The factory explosion is a true story. In this case, our client chose to ship from another factory at their own expense. This helped our client maintain important customer relationships. The client showed dedication to the customer, showing that they understood the urgency of the need.

Live session on AI strategy, governance, and security in manufacturing, with real-world use cases and a custom AI agent takeaway.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Corevist, a provider of SAP-integrated B2B eCommerce solutions, today announced a live virtual webinar examining how manufacturers are adopting artificial intelligence across commercial, operational, and security workflows. The session, “AI in Manufacturing: From Strategy to Security to Real-World ROI,” will be held on Tuesday, December 9, 2025 at 2:00 PM ET.

The 60-minute program will provide practical guidance on AI strategy, governance, use-case development, and cybersecurity, with a focus on the realities facing manufacturers in the midst of digital transformation.

Featured Speakers

Terry Stahler – Chief Customer Officer, Corevist; former CIO, Crayola
Stahler will provide an overview of the AI landscape in manufacturing and discuss how organizations are approaching AI strategy, governance frameworks, and ROI justification for new initiatives.

Tim Brewer – Head of Corevist ZenX Labs
Brewer will outline how Corevist takes AI agents from idea to production for manufacturers, including real-world examples of agents in use today and an early look at concepts under development.

Justin Diana – VP of IT & Security, Corevist
Drawing on more than a decade of experience overseeing infrastructure and cybersecurity, Diana will cover practical guardrails for deploying AI in manufacturing environments, with emphasis on ensuring that innovation aligns with security and compliance requirements.

Interactive Component and Take-Home Resource

As part of the webinar, participants will receive access to a custom B2B eCommerce Analyzer Agent, designed to help organizations explore considerations, risks, and potential next steps for AI and digital commerce initiatives in the context of their own business.

Who Should Attend

• CIOs and IT leaders
• Digital commerce and transformation teams
• Operations and commercial leaders
• Cybersecurity teams supporting SAP-integrated environments

Event Details

• Title: AI in Manufacturing: From Strategy to Security to Real-World ROI
• Date: Tuesday, December 9, 2025
• Time: 2:00 PM ET
• Format: Live virtual session
• Registration:
  https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/bed61cf0-16b5-4749-a949-5ad549409d71@6fd10789-8373-458f-b72d-524a7aea1e01
  (Recording available to all registrants.)

About Corevist
Corevist helps manufacturers deliver modern B2B eCommerce experiences directly connected to SAP. With a real-time integration foundation and modular AI innovation through ZenX Labs, Corevist enables manufacturers to simplify operations, enhance customer experience, and modernize without heavy spend. Learn more at www.corevist.com.