Development Update
All main projects for the Marketplace are being worked on now. The design for the Enterprise Spec Management Portal is finished, and the business analysts are actively testing the portal, identifying software bugs or issues so that developers can fix them.We are targeting late April to early May to have this environment ready for User Acceptance Testing by the Quality and Product teams. This portal will be used by the whole company to manage product specifications and connect related products for all three business units.
Each business unit—GracoRoberts, SkyGeek, and Silmid—is working on its own Specification Module. This is very important for the Marketplace. It sets up how products, documents, compliance information, and vendor details are organized and shared. If this system is not in place, the rest of the integrations and automation won’t work correctly.
The Website storefront build is also progressing across all three sites. This is the customer-facing layer that will expose availability, pricing, and ordering capabilities through each business unit's website. It will include Buy By Batch, Cross-Business Unit Availability, reservations, and allocations, and we are working closely with our external development partners to complete these integrations. We are working on improving how we handle sales orders, drop ship purchase orders, and deliveries so everything runs smoothly. We also make sure important paperwork is sent to the right people/ quickly and accurately.
The overall development target for all major builds is June 12.
Operations
Last month, we held workshops to create standard ways of working for all three business units. These meetings helped us set up three new workflows: Spec Management, Product Onboarding, and Spec Product Association. Next week, we will show these new workflows to the subject matter experts (SMEs) who will use them. Support from leaders is very important to make sure these new processes are shared and used by each department
We have also been working on cleaning up our data. This needs to be finished before we launch the Enterprise Spec Management Portal. The Quality Team - Jef L, Jimmy and Simon - are working closely with the business analysts to set up the process and decide what needs to be done to get ready for launch.
Looking forward, we have a few important tasks coming up. We will hold product management Workshops to help us figure out who is responsible and accountable for each stage of the product lifecycle. Responsible: The people who actually do the work for each task. Accountable: The person who makes sure the work gets done correctly.
These workshops will help us decide which experts from each business are responsible for key parts. We will start our Operations Implementation Kick-Off after we finish making the big process changes and know who will do each job. We will begin standardizing how we manage documents once the Enterprise Portal and all business unit Spec Subsystems are ready.
Product Mapping & Onboarding
For Marketplace to work, the products across all three businesses need to be linked where they overlap. The Product Team are continuing to work on mapping these products, and are measuring their progress through the total amount of business revenue generated by parts linked across all businesses.
The team are currently sat at just over $93m of total business revenue available at all three business units. This is just short of 50% of the total business revenue available to be added to Marketplace.
While product mapping and additional new product onboarding will continue, the team will also be focused on the processes that need to be in place once Marketplace goes live, working with the Business Analysts and SMEs.
Next Steps
Here is a summary of what each workstream is focused on moving forward:
• Development will continue with all major builds, targeting completion by June 12.
• Operations will choose and assign personnel from each business unit for key tasks, keep working on cleaning up data for the Enterprise Portal, and leaders will share the new ways of working with all teams.
• The Catalog Team will complete SDS checks, update their protocol guides, start planning for products with more than one SKU in early May, and carry on reaching their goals.
GracoRoberts | Confidential | April 2026