Mainbridge Import · Metals import & distribution
How a metals importer keeps 261 live orders straight
Impact
73 hrs a yearInbox time Clarity can cover227 repliesSent after 9pm in 90 days
261 live ordersTracked with no data entry
“I honestly just need an automatic pipeline that's accurate, and a chat so I can ask it questions instead of me reading through 60 messages. That's it.”
Kathy Zhang · Mainbridge Import
- Company
- Mainbridge Import
- Trade
- Metals, bought overseas and sold into North America
- Mailbox
- A shared inbox, not a personal one
- Using Clarity since
- April 2026
Three jobs, and only one of them is the work
Mainbridge already had a system. Orders live in a tool called UDU, and keeping it current was a third task stacked on top of the other two.
“I'm spending an hour, an hour and a half just to finish one client. Me doing the paperwork is one thing. Reading emails is another. And then filling out UDU is another.”
Inside the business the same view was put more bluntly: “Just finish everything that you’re supposed to do. Stop wasting time to fill up UDU.”
And the cost of a board that lags shows up as re-reading. Back from a month and a half away, she was asked whether the original quote covered mill finish or a colour finish. “I had to go through six emails to figure out this email chain… if they can tell that to me, then that would save me 20 minutes.”
Open an order from the thread that started it
There is no order entry. The quote goes out by email, the supplier confirms by email, the shipping date moves in a reply, the packing list arrives as an attachment, and the payment turns up as a remittance from a bank nobody warned her about.
What runs
- A quote goes out. Clarity opens the order and attaches the supplier and the buyer.
- A confirmation lands. The order moves a rung, and the reference number is recorded against it.
- A shipping date changes in a reply. The date on the order changes with it.
- Nothing arrives for two weeks. The order is raised as something needing her, thread attached.
139 days in: 261 open orders, 148 companies and 302 contacts, all built from mail she was sending anyway.
The order is not finished when it ships
Metal fails on a delay. A wrong colour or a short count shows up the day the truck arrives. Everything else waits for the job site.
When a fault actually surfaces
- On arrival — quantity and colour, checked against the packing list by the plant manager doing the inventory count.
- About a month — once crews are installing: a loose screw, chipped paint, a panel that sits shaky.
- Two to six months — bubbling, discolouration, fading. A batch installed in March gets looked at again in October.
Which means an order that closed in the spring can reopen in the autumn, and the thread that proves what was ordered, at what finish, at what price, is months up the mailbox. Her words for the cost of that:
“I had to go through six emails to figure out this email chain.”
Every claim is settled on evidence, and the evidence is in the mail
Mainbridge holds a share of each supplier payment back against faults. Getting it back is not a conversation, it is a paperwork exercise, and the burden sits with her.
“They always want proof. They’re like, we don’t know if you guys caused it. There’s no proof. So that’s when we’re like, okay, Mainbridge absorbs the loss.”
Three real ones from a single year. A supplier left an anchor type out of a shipment, so the client bought locally at a 20% premium and the job ran two months late. Recovering that needs the client’s invoice showing the premium. A batch of channels was dipped at an angle because they were too long for the galvanising tank, so the client will only sell them at 80 cents on the dollar, and recovering that needs the email where he says so. A run of coils arrived grooved, the supplier denied it, and testing the metal to prove it would have cost more than the claim was worth, so Mainbridge ate it.
None of that is a CRM job. It is a filing job, and the filing cabinet is a mailbox that has to still know, in October, what a March thread said.
Learn her order stages from her own mail
Clarity started with a generic set of stages and replaced them with the ones Mainbridge actually uses, read out of her own mail rather than picked off a list. 4,940 milestones now sit across those 261 orders.
The test of whether that worked is not a score. It is which screen she trusts when the two disagree.
“I was going to look at Radar from Clarity, because I think Radar is more updated than some of my UDU stuff.”