CASE STUDY: ONE PLACE F
orge Building and Timber Supplies opened its doors in July 2024 with a simple ambition. Keep trading, keep saying yes to customers and keep data clean from day one. In a highly competitive merchant market where speed and product accessibility decide who wins the order, Forge has leaned into its NMBS membership, and especially OnePlace, to move faster, protect its cash flow and build a successful business. Co-founders Craig Fraser and Tom Munkley spent more than a decade each in senior roles in the merchant sector before deciding the time was right to open their own business in Buckingham. Since then, they have built their team up to 10 people. This lean structure makes automation and clean data more than a nice-to-have. It is the only way a startup can compete with bigger players, without piling costs into the back office.
Avoiding the admin
With a small team, every duplicated keystroke is a cost. Forge is standardising purchasing and invoicing through OnePlace so that orders raised flow seamlessly into their systems, without any manual duplication. “Forge is one of the early adopters of automated invoicing through OnePlace, and we are supporting the set-up at no cost,” says Dean Hayward, head of sales and marketing at NMBS.
“Our team maps the formats from example POs and invoices Forge provides to us, which takes the heavy lifting off their team and speeds up the path to straight-through processing.”
Meeting customer expectations There is an additional commercial upside as well. Where available, orders originated through OnePlace unlock an extra two to three per cent rebate from some suppliers. Forge did not factor in any rebates into their early business plans, so they see this money as a form of passive income that helps fund almost another full-time salary each year. Beyond streamlining the back end of the
FORGING AHEAD WITH ONEPLACE
OnePlace is NMBS’s centralised B2B e-commerce platform for independent building merchants and suppliers. BMJ looks at how one NMBS member uses it.
pack sizes, weights and dimensions, and increasingly, sustainability and compliance information. To provide their customers with this, Forge is using OnePlace to pull reliable product information, instead of chasing down spreadsheets from suppliers, which can be a very time-intensive and manual process.
Why this matters
business, OnePlace and NMBS allow Forge to go above and beyond for its customers. When a local contractor requested shower wall panels, not typically a Forge staple, the team didn’t spend days searching and calling around. Instead, they started in OnePlace, identified NMBS suppliers who could supply the line and knew they already had credit terms in place. What might have taken up to five days became a 20-minute quote and a faster result for their customer. Customers usually want to know more than just price and availability. They want manufacturer information, barcodes,
28
Independent merchants often face a hard choice as they grow: whether to add back- office headcount to keep up with admin, or accept slower service at the front. Forge is refusing that trade-off. By aligning with NMBS suppliers and using OnePlace as the operational hub, it is speeding up sourcing, reducing cash flow friction and improving product information availability. “As a start-up, NMBS let us turbocharge our first year. We finished around £3 million in turnover, roughly twice what we forecast, and that simply would not have happened without the credit terms, OnePlace and the NMBS support behind the scenes,” says Fraser. BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net October 2026
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80
