How CTC Handled a Sudden Price Increase and Onboarded a New Equipment Vendor — In Two Days

If you run an HVAC distribution business, you know what last week was supposed to look like at CTC's offices.

Their main equipment vendor introduced sudden price changes, requiring price updates across thousands of SKUs and pricing matrices. And on top of all that, our team in South Carolina was getting ready to take on Luxaire as a primary equipment line — meaning thousands of brand-new equipment and parts SKUs needed to land in our ERP and PIM, complete with descriptions, dimensions, weights, UPCs, and pricing.

A year ago, this kind of scenario would have been a fire drill. A few of our teammates would have spent two weeks doing data entry. We would have made errors. Some of the price matrices wouldn't have been loaded by the May 18 effective date, costing real margin. Some SKUs would have launched without dimensions or barcodes, hurting our scan-pack workflow.

This time, it took an afternoon.

That's because AdvantageOS — our internal operating-system layer — now sits between our team's spreadsheets and our ERP, paired with a product specifications collection engine, automating the rote data work that used to consume bandwidth our salespeople didn't have to spare.

Here's how it played out.

Price increases: 850 matrices in under a day

Accounting handed us spreadsheets covering nearly 850 distinct price matrix records — same effective dates, different prices, quotes, and costs per SKU per customer. Instead of hand-keying each one into the ERP, AdvantageOS ran a single script that reads each spreadsheet, matches catalog numbers to our ERP, posts a price matrix per SKU, and verifies the result. Zero failures. All locked in by the May 18 effective date.

New vendor onboarding: thousands of SKUs ready the same day

The South Carolina expansion required loading thousands of Luxaire and Source1 SKUs into our ERP, alongside collecting product data for all of these SKUs — descriptions, dimensions, taxonomy, images, and certifications. Traditionally, we'd pay an outside Product Information Management vendor a per-SKU fee and wait weeks. Instead, our enrichment pipeline web-searches each model number, extracts attributes from the vendor spec sheet using a large language model, auto-classifies into the right category, and outputs a draft record for human review. The full batch was ready for catalog launch the same afternoon.

What this unlocks

The question we used to ask ourselves was do we have enough hands to handle this volume of data work? The question we ask now is what business problem do we want to solve with the time we just freed up? This week, that meant CTC employees in front of customers instead of in front of ERP product data.

If you're running a distribution business and the words "I can't keep up with updating vendor prices" or "vendor sent us a 20,000-line spreadsheet" trigger a small panic, you're not alone — and you're not stuck. The technology to automate this work has arrived. AdvantageOS has a systems layer that owns the glue between your spreadsheets and your ERP while mining the internet for robust PIM data. The next price-increase letter is coming, new sets of SKUs will need to be created, and ADH's companies are ready for it.