At TUG Connects 2026, we sat down with John Birdsall, Charlie Del Vecchio, Val Salem of Tropic Supply to have a conversation about their experience with Kodaris.
Tropic Supply is a 24-location HVAC and refrigeration wholesale company in Florida. Family-owned since 1972, Charles F. Del Vecchio began buying buildings and warehouses in Miami and expanded the business north to Tallahassee over the decades. They're privately held, regional, and competing every day against national companies with IT budgets and technology teams that dwarf theirs.
Three years ago, that was becoming a serious problem.
"Our competitors were throwing tons and tons of money in technology and really getting ahead of us in time," said Charlie Del Vecchio, grandson of the founder. "We wanted to stay with that relationship-based business. But we needed to find a partner and find solutions that could accelerate us in the technology space."
Tropic's Commerce business was sitting just below 3% of sales. They had a patchwork of point solutions: a separate Commerce platform, a separate CRM, a separate PIM, a separate payment processor. Each one a different contract, different support team, different data environment. With these tools, we could not move the needle.
They began looking for a commerce solution. What they found was Kodaris, a platform they could build their entire technology strategy on.
In less than a year, Tropic moved Commerce, CRM, AP Automation, and Credit Card Processing onto Kodaris. "I look at it like we were like SpaceX. We were already taking off. A lot of technology packages take years to implement,” said John Birdsall, Chief Financial and Technology Officer.
The savings landed well north of six figures. Significant savings and reduction in overhead for the company.
And they're not done.
This year, Tropic is bringing Bill Payment onto the Kodaris platform. Customers will be able to pay bills, view invoices, and review statements all in one place. The customer credit application process, which previously required back-and-forth across multiple systems, now runs entirely through Kodaris and integrates directly into their ERP once a customer is approved. CRM went live two months ago. AP invoice processing started last week.
Every new capability is on the same platform. No new vendor, no new contract, no new integration to maintain.
"It was literally a no-brainer to say let's go with a solution that we're not adding other technology platforms to get to where we needed to be,” Birdsall said.
The Price Book capability alone transformed how their counter and sales teams work. What used to require pulling a report, building a spreadsheet, routing it through a pricing manager, and calling it back to the customer can now be done by the customer directly.
"Now the customer can go in and literally self-service. I like this, I want this, I want that. Print! And there you go. So you have your customer satisfied,” Val Salem, IT Business Transformation Analyst said.
The team described just that one feature as roughly saved half a headcount in effort per year just for that process.
Change management is always where technology projects get hard. Tropic ran webinars for customers, trained counter teams and sales teams, so they could walk customers through it in real time. If a customer had a question at the counter, the rep knew exactly where to go.
The early reaction from customers caught them off guard. People who had ignored the previous ecommerce offering entirely came back asking for more.
"They had no faith before. They just pushed it to the side. But now that we've pushed out to the website, they have faith,” Salem said.
Customers who used to call a salesperson to get a report are now self-servicing Price Sheets, creating order templates, printing their own invoices, and managing their own account.
Internally, the response was the same. New employees were asking how to get access before anyone had thought to provision them. "How do I get access? He has access, I want access. They want to participate. They feel good about it," Salem said. Not a reaction you typically see when you're rolling out a new platform.
Tropic runs a small IT team. Their national competitors have been spending millions building out technology capabilities for years. That gap was real.
"Our largest competitors were just piling millions of dollars that we don't have into building out their tech stack. We don't have the capabilities for doing that," Del Vecchio said.
But being part of the Kodaris community changed the equation. "We now have access to a team of IT specialists and engineers with a number of products that are willing to develop what we need. It's on even or even ahead of what our competitors can do," Del Vecchio continued.
That's not a small statement for a regional distributor competing against nationals.
The community model is a big part of why it works that way. When Tropic needed a Price Book feature, Kodaris built it. That feature is now available to every other customer on the platform. Every member of the Kodaris community contributes their ideas and their needs, and everyone builds on top of what gets created. "There are all these features and each member of the community is contributing their own ideas, their own needs. As they contribute, you can then go to Kodaris and feed off those ideas," Del Vecchio said. That's the innovation flywheel working the way it should.
The big box platform providers aren't going to do that. Del Vecchio noted, "A lot of the big box competitors aren't going to tailor it to what you're going to need." Tropic didn't want a cookie-cutter solution. They wanted a platform they could grow with, built by a team that understood their business and was willing to solve their specific problems.
What Kodaris is working on building is a platform where a company like Tropic who is regional, family-owned, with a small IT team can compete with anyone. Not by matching the nationals dollar for dollar on headcount and technology spend, but by running better technology, consolidating their point solutions, and having a community behind them that keeps building.
One year in, Tropic is doing exactly that. And they're just getting started.