Building Profit4: 25 Years of wholesaling software with Andrew Davies.

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Welcome to the first in our series of interviews with Andrew Davies, Chief Technology Officer at OGL Software. So, Andrew, as someone who's been with OGL for 36 years, what was the most

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challenging technical hurdle in transitioning from the legacy ProfitPlus environment to the modern browser-based architecture of Profit4? For me, it wasn't ProfitPlus itself. It was one step further back than that.

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The difficult decision was moving away from Sculptor. Sculptor was our proven technology for decades, an all-in-one 4GL that handled the

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database, the business logic, and the front end as a single tightly bound package. It worked, and it was fast. It had done the job well for years.

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There's a particular kind of risk in retiring something that isn't broken, especially when it's the foundation everything else sits on.

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We made the call to move to a modern stack, Postgres, Java, React, and split those layers apart properly for the first time.

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At the time, that was a significant risk to take on. You're trading something known and stable for something that must prove itself.

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Looking back now, it's paid off in ways that would've been very difficult to get from Sculptor. The user experience is completely different.

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We can present data visually in a browser in ways a 4GL was never designed for, and we can integrate with other systems far more easily because we're not locked into

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one supplier's closed ecosystem. But I won't pretend it felt low risk at the time. It didn't. Thank you, Andrew. Join us again tomorrow when Andrew will share more insights into

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how OGL's decision not to move to a pure self-serve SaaS solution has shaped Profit4. In the meantime, if you would like to find out more about Profit4, visit

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ogl.co.uk.

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Welcome to the second in our series of interviews with Andrew Davies, Chief Technology Officer at OGL Software. Hi, Andrew. So today's question is, OGL has stayed customer-focused and

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professional services-driven rather than becoming a pure self-serve SaaS business. How has that choice shaped the kind of software you build?

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More software companies are moving towards the pure SaaS model, more self-service, one-size-fits-all configuration, minimal human contact. We deliberately haven't done that, and it shapes almost everything about how we

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build. When you sell primarily through relationships and implement through professional services, you can't hide behind a generic onboarding flow.

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Our implementation consultants sit with a wholesaler's warehouse team or a distributor's finance team and see exactly where friction shows up in how the

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business runs. That feedback loop comes back into product decisions far faster and far more honestly than if we only heard about problems after the fact.

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It also means we can build genuinely specialized functionality without needing it to be simple enough for a complete stranger to configure alone.

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Because our customers are supported through implementation, we can build deep sector-specific functionality, like our integration with Luckins for electrical

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wholesalers, that would be genuinely difficult to deliver as a self-serve product. It's a slower, more expensive way to grow than pure SaaS, but I think it's the

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reason customers who've been with us for 15 or 20 years are still with us. They're not just buying software, they're buying a relationship with people who

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understand their business. Thank you, Andrew. Join us again tomorrow when Andrew will talk about how an ERP solution like Profit4 meets the needs of a diverse customer base.

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In the meantime, if you would like to find out more about Profit4, visit ogl.co.uk.

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Welcome to the third in our series of interviews with Andrew Davies, Chief Technology Officer at OGL Software. Hi, Andrew. Your customers range from small merchants with just a handful of users

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to large distributors running well over 100. How do you build one product that genuinely works across that whole range without

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overwhelming the small end or underserving the large end? Honestly, you don't solve this from a desk. There's nothing like watching someone actually use the software rather than having

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someone else try to describe that experience to you secondhand. What a user does with their hands, where they hesitate, what they click without

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thinking versus what stops them, you don't get that from a requirements document. And it goes further than watching someone use it in our office.

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We go out and see customers in their own environment, working under their actual conditions. If you're building a warehouse management piece, your users aren't

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sitting at a desk in good lighting with a mouse and a big monitor. They're on a handheld device, moving around a warehouse, dealing with poor

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lighting, racking in the way, and gloves on in a cold store. That's a completely different design problem to the one you'd assume sitting in an

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office, and you only really understand it by going and standing in the warehouse yourself. That's how we handle that whole range from a handful of users right up to

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large multi-site operations. It's less about designing two versions of a screen and more about making sure the people building the product have seen both ends of that

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spectrum: a small merchant working out of a single office and a large distributor running multiple warehouses. Great. Thanks, Andrew. Join us tomorrow when Andrew will explain why OGL have

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focused Profit4 specifically on the needs of wholesalers and distributors. In the meantime, if you would like to find out more about Profit4, visit

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ogl.co.uk.

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Welcome to the fourth in our series of interviews with Andrew Davies, Chief Technology Officer at OGL Software. Hello again, Andrew. So today, we would like to know a little more about what gives

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Profit4 a real edge for a modern wholesaler or distributor beyond just being cloud-based. A lot of ERP suppliers sell you a core system and then leave you to go and find,

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evaluate, and stitch together everything else yourself. A warehouse management system from one supplier, an e-commerce platform from another, a rebate management tool from a third.

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Each of those comes with its own contract, its own support desk, its own upgrade cycle, and getting them all to talk to each other reliably becomes a project in its

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own right, one that usually falls on the customer to manage. We've built Profit4 differently. A B2B portal, full B2B and B2C e-commerce websites, warehouse management, rebate

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management, and OpenAPI integrations are all part of the same platform, built to work with Profit4 from the start rather than bolted on afterwards.

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For a wholesaler or distributor, that means one system managing stock, one version of pricing, and one place customer orders land, whether that order came in through

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a sales rep, a portal, or a website. That matters practically, not just architecturally. A bolted-together stock or e-commerce setup is only ever as reliable as its weakest

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integration, and something tends to break whenever one side updates without the other. Because we build and maintain the whole thing ourselves, a customer isn't

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relying on two different suppliers playing nicely together just to fulfill an order correctly, and they're not carrying the overhead of managing several supplier

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relationships to run one business. That's the edge I'd point to. Not a single feature, but not having to assemble your own ERP from several

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different suppliers in the first place. Interesting. Thanks, Andrew. Join us tomorrow to hear Andrew's view of the role of

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AI and automation. In the meantime, if you would like to find out more about Profit4, visit ogl.co.uk.

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Welcome to the fifth and penultimate episode in our series of interviews with Andrew Davies, Chief Technology Officer at OGL Software.

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Hi, Andrew. We're excited to hear your thoughts on the much-talked-about topic of AI. With AI increasingly built into modern ERP systems, what does that

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actually look like inside Profit4 today, rather than just as a marketing line? The most visible example is analytics. Historically, a wholesaler wanting to understand which product lines were genuinely

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profitable, once you accounted for stockholding costs, or which customers were quietly drifting away, would need to export data and build their own analysis,

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assuming they had someone with the time and skill to do it. AI Insights puts that directly in front of them inside Profit4 itself, built on the

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operational data that's already flowing through the system every day. A sales manager or a business owner can now ask a question like, "Are we buying and

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selling this range well?" and get an answer in minutes rather than commissioning a report. But analytics is only part of it.

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We've also built an MCP server for Profit4, which lets AI tools connect directly and securely into a customer's own data and act on it rather than just report on

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it. I was talking with a customer recently about a good example of what that opens up. Their account managers spend a fair amount of time preparing before a customer

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call, pulling together order history, buying patterns, and anything relevant happening in that customer's own business or market. With an MCP connection, that briefing document can be put together automatically,

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drawing on the order history already sitting in Profit4, alongside wider company information sourced from the internet, so the account manager walks into the call

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already prepared rather than spending the morning building a summary by hand. Another idea came out of a similar conversation with a different customer working

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the other way around. When a lead comes in from their website, rather than a salesperson starting from a blank prospect record, AI could do the initial research

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on the company first, with that research attached to the new prospect record in their CRM for reference. By the time someone picks up the lead, there's already

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useful context sitting there, rather than just a name and an email address. Sales order imports are another good example.

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Customers send orders in all sorts of formats, PDFs, spreadsheets, emails written in plain English, and someone has traditionally had to sit and rekey that into the

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system by hand. AI is well-suited to reading that kind of unstructured order and turning it into a properly formed sales order in Profit4 without a person having to

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interpret it line by line first. It's not the most exciting piece of automation, but it's exactly the kind of repetitive, error-prone work that AI is good at.

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That's really the shift I'd point to. It isn't AI replacing the account manager, the salesperson, or the person processing orders. It's removing the repetitive manual work that used to eat into

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their day, so their time is used on the things that actually need a person's judgment. The people are still doing the important part, the software just gets

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them there faster and better prepared. Interesting. Thanks, Andrew. Join us tomorrow for our final interview with Andrew, when he will talk about the legacy of innovation.

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In the meantime, if you would like to find out more about Profit4, visit ogl.co.uk.

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Welcome to our final interview in this series with Andrew Davies, Chief Technology Officer at OGL Software. Well, Andrew, we have reached our final interview in this series.

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So for your closing words, what we would like to know is: having worked at OGL Software since 1990, how do you balance the responsibility of maintaining OGL's

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50-year heritage with the need to stay at the cutting edge of technological advancement? A lot of OGL's early years were about digitizing manual processes, taking things

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that used to live on paper or in someone's head and putting them into software. I'm cautious about predicting where the next 50 years of technology goes over that

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kind of horizon. Anyone who tells you confidently what software looks like in 50 years in a world where the tools are changing meaningfully every few months,

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probably hasn't been paying close enough attention. So rather than guess, I'd rather talk about what I expect to stay constant.

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What won't change is that we build software grounded in a genuine understanding of the people who use it. We innovate because we understand the problem, not just

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because a technology exists. The interface itself may end up looking quite different with AI, perhaps far more conversational than the browser-based screens

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we build today. It's a bit like the shift from driving to Blockbuster to rent a video, to streaming whatever you want the moment you want it.

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You used to have to go somewhere to get what you wanted. Now it just comes to you the moment you ask for it.

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The tools we use to solve customers' problems will keep changing. They always have across all 50 years of OGL, but staying close to the customers we

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serve, understanding their business before we write a line of code, is the thing that's carried us this far. I'd also say that relationships and trust don't get

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automated. However far AI takes our products, and I think it will take them a long way, customers will still want to know there's a team behind the software who

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understands their business and will be there when something matters. That combination of capable technology and a genuine relationship is, I think, what

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the next 50 years of OGL will still be built on, even if almost everything else about how we build it looks completely different.

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Thank you, Andrew. It's been great to hear your thoughts over the last few days on all aspects of how ERP software is helping stockists and distributors in the UK and

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where you see OGL and Profit4 in the years to come. If you have missed any of our interviews, you can watch them on the OGL website.

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Likewise, if you would like to find out more about Profit4 and how it could help your business, visit ogl.co.uk.