01 / 05
The challenge
Saudi Ceramics had a catalogue of 3,200+ SKUs across tile, sanitaryware and industrial ceramics, and a dealer network stretching across 18 countries. Each dealer had, until now, a printed catalogue and a WhatsApp thread with a regional sales rep. Every quote request bounced through three humans and two spreadsheets. Order accuracy hovered at 91% — good, but not enterprise-grade.
The strategic goal was clear: give dealers a self-service portal where they could search the full catalogue, generate quotes, place orders, and access technical specs — in their own language, from any device, with authentication tied to their existing company Azure AD.
02 / 05
Our approach
We designed the portal around three principles: search that never lies, quotes that never round wrong, and content that adapts to the reader. We chose Laravel + Livewire + PostgreSQL + Meilisearch. Livewire because the portal is fundamentally form-driven and we wanted the ops team to be able to extend it without touching JavaScript. Meilisearch because dealer search is a first-class user experience — misspellings, transliterations, product codes and Arabic queries all need to return the right SKU in under 50ms.
PIM (product information management) lived inside Filament. The client team can now edit specs, upload images, mark availability by region, and translate content in one interface. Every field flows into three languages (English, Arabic, French) with fallback rules that stop empty pages from ever shipping.
03 / 05
Key decisions
We integrated with Azure AD via SAML from day one. No consumer authentication, no passwords stored locally. A dealer's laptop already knows who they are; the portal simply asks Microsoft to confirm it and hands over a signed token. Onboarding a new dealer country went from three weeks (paperwork + local IT) to under a day.
Every price is computed server-side against the dealer's tier, region, and currency at request time. No caching, no client-side math. This eliminates entire classes of pricing-drift bugs that plagued the spreadsheet era.
We chose full RTL support in the design system from day one, not as a retrofit. Arabic isn't an afterthought — it's the primary language for roughly half the dealer base. Every component was designed both LTR and RTL, with numerals, iconography and layout flipped where linguistically appropriate.
04 / 05
What changed
Onboarded dealers in 18 countries in the first 90 days. Order accuracy climbed from 91% to 99.4% because dealers now enter SKUs directly against the live catalogue rather than transcribing from a PDF. Average time from quote request to confirmed order dropped from 4.7 days to 11 hours. The sales team reallocated 30% of their time from data entry to actual relationship work.
05 / 05
Where we're headed
We're building a shipment-tracking layer that ties into their SAP freight module. Dealers will see live container ETAs and can flag exceptions directly to the ops team — closing the last part of the loop that still lives on WhatsApp.
