Distributors and importers
Your stock is physical. Your business is not.
A medical-device distributor runs two systems that never meet: pallets, shelves and consignment cupboards on one side, and the relationships that decide what gets ordered on the other. Armage builds both, and joins them.
Identity
Every unit, not every line
Custody
Recorded, not reconstructed
Recall
One query, not one week
Reach
Findable by the people who order
01
What actually runs the business today
In most distribution businesses the real system of record is a combination of accounting software, a spreadsheet and a mailbox. The same transaction is entered more than once, in more than one place, by more than one person. It works, because people make it work.
The cost shows up at the edges. Nobody can say where a specific unit is without asking someone. Consignment stock is trusted rather than counted. A question about a single batch becomes a week of email. And the commercial side — which clinicians know your products exist — runs on the memory of whoever last attended a congress.
None of that is a failure of effort. It is the absence of a system that treats a physical object and a commercial relationship as the same kind of thing: something with an identity, a history, and a place it belongs.
02
Giving every unit an identity
The codes are already printed on the boxes. A GS1 Data Matrix on a sterile pouch carries which product it is, which batch it came from, when it expires and, for many devices, which individual unit it is. Most distributors never read them, so the information stops at the loading bay.
Reading them changes what the business can answer, and it changes nothing about how the warehouse works:
(01)09506000134352(17)270831(10)A4419(21)000247
- (01) GTIN
- 09506000134352Which product this is — the device identifier that stays the same for every unit of the line.
- (17) Expiry
- 2027-08-31Encoded YYMMDD. The date the unit stops being usable, carried by the unit itself.
- (10) Lot
- A4419The batch. This is the field a recall is answered with.
- (21) Serial
- 000247This exact unit, distinct from every other unit of the same lot.
A single symbol carries the device identifier and the production identifiers together. Read once at goods-in, it is the difference between counting boxes and knowing units.
Where a unit needs to prove it is genuine rather than merely labelled, the system also supports tamper-resistant NFC tags that authenticate cryptographically against the server rather than simply carrying a number. That is a different assurance from a printed code, and the difference matters for high-value implants.
03
Knowing what is where
Custody is the record of where a unit has been and who had it. Built properly it is not a report you produce — it is a property of the system, written as each movement happens, and queryable afterwards.
- Received
- Checked against the purchase order and the documentation that came with it.
- Day 0
- In stock
- Located to a shelf, a room and a site — not simply to a quantity.
- Day 0
- Consigned
- Moved to a hospital under consignment, still yours, now somewhere else.
- Day 34
- Used
- Recorded at the point of use and removed from stock, with the unit identified.
- Day 61
The commercial value of that record is not the audit trail. It is the question it makes cheap: every unit of this lot, where is it now? That question currently costs a week and ends in a number nobody is certain of. As a query it costs seconds and ends in a list.
04
The people who touch it, and the screens they use
A record that depends on someone typing into a laptop afterwards is a record that decays. The workflows are built for the places the work actually happens:
- Goods receipt that runs the incoming checks as a checklist — including the verification steps the EU Medical Device Regulation sets out for distributors in Article 14(2) — so the check is performed and recorded rather than remembered.
- Quarantine and non-conformance as first-class states, because stock that is wrong needs somewhere to be that is not "in stock".
- Offline-capable field flows on a phone, because warehouse corners and hospital basements do not have reliable signal, and a system that stops working there is a system people route around.
- Role separation so the person receiving stock, the person releasing it and the person approving an exception are distinguishable in the record.
05
The commercial layer above the stock
Knowing where your stock is does not sell any of it. The other half of a distribution business is whether the people who specify and order your products can find out that they exist — and, increasingly, whether an assistant answering a clinician's question knows about them.
- A product presence that is machine-readable. Structured, accurate pages for what you carry, emitted with the schema that search engines and AI assistants read, rather than a PDF catalogue nobody can query.
- Portals for the people who order. Hospital supply teams and clinical users with their own access, seeing their own consignment, their own history, their own documents.
- Publishing infrastructure. The technical explanations, instructions and answers that make a distributor the source rather than a reseller — and the measurement of whether that is actually being cited.
06
Why one company does both
This is the part most vendors cannot do, and it is the reason Armage exists.
The physical layer
Units, lots, shelves, custody
What exists, where it is, whose it is, and what has been verified about it.
The join
The same identity, used by both
A product is one entity. The identifier that proves which unit is in a theatre is the identifier that a product page, a portal and an answer engine describe. Held once, it is trustworthy in both directions; held twice, the two copies disagree within a quarter.
The commercial layer
Discovery, portals, publishing
Who knows the product exists, who can order it, and what they are told when they ask.
An inventory vendor stops at the loading bay. A marketing agency starts after it. Neither can answer a clinician's question with a fact drawn from the stock record, and neither can tell you that the thing you are about to promote is three months from expiry in a hospital cupboard.
07
What exists today
Stated with grades, because the difference between built and designed is exactly what a buyer is trying to establish:
- Identity, custody and the regulated workflows — built, multi-tenant, EU-hosted, with hardware-backed sign-in and a hash-chained audit log. Built
- Document and label reading — built, behind a flag. Built
- Publishing and discovery infrastructure — built as the system this website runs on; the measurement layer is in progress. Built, engine in progress
- Item and instrument recognition from images — the tooling is in hand, nothing is trained or deployed, and we will not describe it as a product until it is. Capable, not built
- Location tracking by radio — specified and deliberately not built. Barcode and NFC answer the question for a fraction of the cost. Specified, not built
FAQ
Common questions
- We already have accounting software. What does this replace?
- Nothing. It sits alongside it and hands line data across. Accounting software knows what you bought and what you invoiced; it does not know which unit is on which shelf, which lot went to which hospital, or which serial was used in which procedure.
- Does it issue invoices?
- No, deliberately. The system hands line data to your invoicing system and never issues or numbers an invoice. That boundary keeps a whole class of tax and accounting obligation outside the software, which is simpler and safer for both of us.
- Our stock moves through hospitals on consignment. Does that work?
- Yes. Consignment is the case the system is built around: stock that is still yours but is not in your building, and that has to be findable, countable and recallable anyway.
- What if we are not ready to change how the warehouse works?
- Then start with identity only. Capturing the codes that are already printed on the boxes changes nothing about your process and gives you the record. Everything else can come later.
Take one product line, end to end
Pick a single line — one you carry, one that moves on consignment — and we will show you what it looks like with an identity and a custody record, against your own catalogue structure. Thirty minutes. Write to hello@arm-age.com.