Monday morning, 7:40 a.m.: In the branch inbox are a shell construction contractor's quantity list as a PDF, three phone photos of a foreman's handwritten notes and a BoQ excerpt for a multi-family house. The ERP cannot do anything with any of these documents directly. Software for building materials distribution usually covers inventory, point of sale, dispatch and invoicing well. The gap lies before that: in reading, matching and pricing unstructured requests and orders. That is exactly where AI helps in sales, as a complement to the ERP, not as a replacement.

Key takeaways

• The ERP remains the backbone of a building materials distributor: item master, pricing, inventory, dispatch, invoicing.

• The bottleneck in inside sales sits before the ERP: project requests, quantity lists, BoQ excerpts and orders arrive as PDFs, photos, Excel or free text.

• AI software like Mercura reads these inbound documents, matches each line item to your own range and hands the reviewed transaction over to the ERP.

• The biggest gain is in project business and in drop shipments with manufacturer price requests, the smallest in counter sales.

• Inside sales remains the quality control: uncertain line items are flagged, not guessed.

What software does a building materials distributor need today?

At its core, a building materials distributor needs an ERP (merchandise management system) with item master, conditions, inventory, dispatch and invoicing, plus a point of sale for pickup business, often a B2B shop and route planning for site deliveries. AI software for requests and orders is not another ERP but a layer in front of it: it turns unstructured inbound documents into structured transactions.

The following overview shows which building blocks of a typical software landscape for building materials distribution work together, what role the ERP plays and where the use of AI actually changes something.

Where does inside sales at a building materials distributor get stuck?

The bottleneck in building materials distribution is rarely the ERP but the translation between the customer's language and the item master. Customers write "KS 17.5 plan block", "flat lintels 1.25" or "12 cm basement insulation", while the ERP only knows article numbers, formats and packaging units. Today, experienced salespeople do this translation in their heads, line item by line item.

On top of that come peculiarities that other wholesale industries do not have in this form:

• Many formats per day: Quantity lists from a construction company's estimating software, Excel sheets from a developer, BoQ excerpts from a planner, photos of notes from the site container.

• Units: The same goods are requested in pieces, m², layers, pallets or tons. What the customer means is not always clear.

• Ancillary costs: Freight, crane unloading, small-quantity surcharges and reusable pallets belong in every quote but are easily forgotten.

• Drop shipment and stock: Large quantities such as masonry blocks, roof tiles or insulation often go as a drop shipment directly from the plant to the construction site. In a drop shipment, goods are delivered directly by the manufacturer without intermediate storage, and the distributor takes on invoicing and risk. For such line items, inside sales needs a project price from the manufacturer up front.

• Time pressure: Construction companies calculate against a bid deadline themselves and ask several distributors in parallel. Whoever answers later is often out of the game.

Every branch manager knows the result: large project requests sit because daily business takes priority. Under the keyword "AI in construction," the talk is mostly about planning and the construction site. In distribution, AI is interesting above all for exactly this bottleneck in inside sales.

Example: How does AI process a project request at a building materials distributor?

AI-based software for building materials distribution reads the request, breaks it into line items, matches each line item to an article from your own range, checks the specification and presents inside sales with a quote draft for approval. Unclear lines are flagged. The following example is anonymized and simplified.

Example: Project request from a shell construction contractor by email

Subject: Request, construction project multi-family house Lindenstraße, delivery from week 14 in three call-offs

Hello everyone, please send a quote for the following material:

1. KS plan block 17.5 cm, compressive strength class 20, approx. 420 m² of wall

2. Flat lintels 11.5 x 1.25 m, 32 pcs

3. Thin-bed mortar to match item 1, 60 bags

4. XPS perimeter insulation 120 mm, 210 m²

5. Bitumen thick coating, 25 buckets

Delivery with crane unloading, please show freight separately.

This is how Mercura, an AI software for quote and order automation in technical sales, processes it:

1. Capture: The email is read, and the five line items are structured with quantity, unit and description.

2. Match: Each line item is compared with your own item master, including long texts. Customer designations like "KS plan block 17.5" are matched to the right article.

3. Check: The requested characteristics (wall thickness, compressive strength class, insulation thickness) are checked against the product data. For line item 1, the unit is given as "m² of wall" instead of pieces; the line is flagged for clarification instead of guessing a quantity.

4. Rank: If several articles meet the requirement, the compliant options are sorted by margin. Pricing itself stays in the ERP.

5. Manufacturer request: For line items that run as drop shipments or are not in stock, the system creates a price request to the supplier and reads the reply back.

6. Approval: Inside sales reviews the draft, adds to it if needed and approves. The quote is written into the ERP and scheduled for follow-up.

So the salesperson no longer retypes five line items and searches for article numbers but reviews and decides. For large shell or finishing BoQs with hundreds of line items, the difference is correspondingly bigger. How a BoQ is structured is explained in the article Bill of quantities (BoQ).

How does AI help with orders and call-offs from the construction site?

For orders, AI supports order entry: the software picks up the order from the shared inbox, routes it to the right branch or sales rep, translates customer designations and old article numbers, adds surcharge lines such as freight or packaging and books the order into the ERP after approval.

In building materials distribution, orders are often short and urgent: "Tomorrow morning to the site: 2 pallets mortar, 40 bags cement, 10 lattice girders." Some arrive as a photo, some as a forwarded Excel list, some as a call-off against an already negotiated project. The basics of automated entry are described in Automate order entry; the related product page is Order processing.

When does AI software not fit a building materials distributor?

AI software for requests and orders is a poor fit when most revenue comes from the counter, customers already order cleanly through a shop or EDI, or only a few project requests arrive per branch. In that case, point of sale, shop and a good ERP are the better investment.

To be honest, artificial intelligence has limits too, whether it is machine learning in specialized software or general AI tools such as chatbots:

• Technical advice remains technical advice. Questions about building physics, system build-ups or warranty are answered not by matching but by the know-how of an experienced salesperson or the manufacturer.

• Standardized channels have strengths. Where large customers order via EDI, the order is already structured. The comparison of both routes is in EDI or AI?.

• Ambiguous requests stay ambiguous. If a customer writes "blocks for 420 m² of wall," a follow-up question or an assumption by the salesperson is needed. The software flags such lines but does not decide them.

How does implementation work at a building materials distributor?

Implementation starts with a technical test on your own data, usually within two working days; first workflows typically go live in less than four weeks. No upfront training is needed, and an incomplete item master is no obstacle, because the software also reads data sheets, technical documents and catalog texts.

What matters for IT and management:

• The ERP stays in the lead. Mercura works with SAP S/4HANA, SAP ECC, SAP Business One, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, proALPHA and UniTrade, among others; other systems are connected via an API or SFTP. Prices and calculation stay in the ERP. Details under Integrations.

• Product data: DATANORM, BMEcat, Open Masterdata and ETIM, among others, are read.

• Security: ISO/IEC 27001 certified, GDPR-compliant, hosting in Europe, a separate tenant per customer. Customer data does not train external AI models.

• Experience: Mercura works with several distributors from building materials distribution and is in use at more than 80 distributors and manufacturers in Europe and the US across 115 locations. The average hit rate when matching is 92%, depending on customer and catalog.

More about the solution for distributors under Solutions for distributors and Quotes and tenders.

Try it with your own request Bring a real project request, quantity list or site order: in 30 minutes we show you how Mercura handles it in your process. Book a meeting

Conclusion

Good software for building materials distribution starts with the ERP but does not end there. The biggest time sink in inside sales is translating quantity lists, BoQ excerpts and site orders into article numbers. AI closes exactly this gap before the ERP, while pricing and approval stay with the distributor. If you have many project requests and email orders, you should test this with your own documents; if your business is mostly counter sales, you are better off investing in point of sale and shop.

Further reading

• Quotes and tenders: turn every request into a quote

• Civil Engineering Supply: Faster Quotes Before the Bid

• Quote Creation for Building Materials Manufacturers: Roofing and Facade

• Customer story: Muffenrohr (civil engineering supply)

• Mercura vs. kinisto: BoQs, Orders and Supplier Requests

• Mercura vs. turian: AI for BoQs, Quotes and Orders

Frequently asked questions

What software do building materials distributors use? Building materials distributors usually use an ERP (merchandise management system) as the core system, complemented by point of sale, B2B shop and route planning. AI software for requests and orders comes in as an additional layer that translates emails, PDFs and photos into structured transactions.

Does AI software replace the ERP in building materials distribution? No, the ERP remains the leading system for item master, prices, inventory and documents. The AI prepares quotes and orders and writes them into the ERP after approval by inside sales.

Can AI read handwritten orders from the construction site? Yes, photos and scans of order notes are read and broken into line items. If a line is illegible or ambiguous, it is flagged for review and not guessed.

What is the difference between drop shipment and stock business? In a drop shipment, the manufacturer delivers directly to the construction site and the distributor issues the invoice; in stock business, the goods come from the distributor's own warehouse. For drop shipment line items, inside sales usually needs a project price from the manufacturer, which creates additional price requests.

How quickly can AI be tested in building materials distribution? A technical test on your own data is usually possible within two working days. First productive workflows typically run in less than four weeks.

What does AI in construction mean in concrete terms for distributors? For distributors, AI mainly means faster processing of requests and orders, not construction planning or site robotics. More answered requests mean more chances to win orders, especially for projects with tight bid deadlines.