Why we built it
We asked buyers what actually hurts about subcontract purchasing. The answers were consistent. Chasing order updates by email. Hunting for the right drawing revision at reorder time. Certificates that arrive weeks after the parts, if at all. Finding out about a delay when the delivery date has already passed.
So we built our own system instead of buying one, ran TrueNorth on it, and then gave our customers the keys. The screenshots below are from a live demonstration account, and what you see is exactly what a customer sees.
Your orders, tracked like a parcel
Every order runs on a milestone timeline: confirmed, material ordered, material received, machining, finishing, inspection, despatched. Each stage is stamped when it happens, so "where is my order?" takes ten seconds to answer at any hour, without writing an email.
The part nobody else does is at the top of this screenshot. When something slips, you hear it from us first, with the reason and a firm new date. Not a tracking number that quietly goes stale. A written delivery update, before the promised date passes.
My Parts: your catalogue, remembered
Every part you order goes on your shelf, locked to the exact drawing revision it was made from. Order it again in one click. The drawing question disappears, because the platform will not let a locked part be made from the wrong revision.
Parts you reorder carry a locked price for 12 months, and the lock is shown right on the card. If the underlying raw material moves more than 10%, we show you the cost movement and renegotiate openly. No quiet increases.
Quotes you accept online
Quotes show the list price and your net price per line. Tick the lines you want, accept, and the order is placed and confirmed in the same minute. Untick anything you are not ready for and come back while the quote is valid.
Our Zero-Defect Guarantee and the 12-Month Price Lock are printed on every quote, because a promise you have to ask for is not much of a promise.
Paperwork that does itself
Every delivery is signed for by name, and the signature shows up on the order the moment it happens. Behind each delivery note sits a traceability pack: certificate of conformity, EN 10204 3.1 mill certificates and dimensional inspection records, tied to the material lot that went into your parts. During an audit, that is a download, not a week of emails.
Invoices live in the same place, against the same order, so your accounts team stops asking you to forward PDFs.
The factory side runs in the same system
This is the part you would not see on a marketplace. Our manufacturing partners work in the same platform: they acknowledge orders, log material heat numbers against your batch, record which machine made your parts and submit dimensional measurements as they inspect. Your traceability pack is built from that data, not typed up afterwards.
When a part repeats, the shop that made it last time is shown its own process record: the machine, the fixture, the program. Repeat batches get made the same way as the first one, from records rather than from memory. If you have ever had a perfect first batch and a puzzling second one, you know why this matters.
The supplier's view. Your company name is never shown to the shop at quoting stage; drawing title blocks are scrubbed before a drawing goes out.
Try it before you order
Want to click around first? Ask for a demonstration login and we will set one up the same day. You get the customer portal exactly as our customers see it, filled with sample data.
Every customer gets their own login with their first order. There is no charge and no software to install. It is simply how working with TrueNorth works.
Digital Factory FAQ
No. Every TrueNorth customer gets a login with their first order. It is part of how we work, not a product we sell.
No. Email and phone work exactly as before. The platform is there for the moments a portal is faster: checking where an order is at 7am, pulling a certificate during an audit, reordering a part without writing an email.
Your company and TrueNorth. Access is separated per company at database level, and every account signs in with two-factor authentication. When a drawing goes out to a manufacturing partner for quoting, the title block is scrubbed first, so the shop sees the geometry and tolerances, and not your company's identity.
Place an order and your login arrives with the order confirmation. If you want to click around first, ask for a demonstration login and we will set one up the same day.
In the EU, with documents held in our own Microsoft 365 tenant. Sign-in is by emailed link plus a one-time code from an authenticator app. There are no passwords to steal or phish.