AIRpipe USA Has Grown 30% a Year, 3 Years Running, with Zoey At Its Center

The Problem: Manual Order Entry, Zero Customer Visibility, and An Overworked Team

AIRpipe USA distributes industrial pipe, fittings, and related products to contractors and distributors across North America. When Michael Buis joined the company in 2023, the operation was running on a legacy system called DDI: old, server-based, and built for a different era.

Orders came in the same way they always had. Phone, email, fax. Every one of them was entered manually into the system by a customer service rep. That was the entire process.

The team was running at full capacity just to keep up. There was no room to grow, no visibility into what was happening with a shipment once it left the warehouse, and no way to flex when inventory ran short.

If a customer called and asked when their order was shipping, the answer was: sometime next week. If it did not arrive, they would call back, and someone would try to track it down through internal systems. Customers had no way to check for themselves.

The inventory problem was just as limiting. If a product was out of stock at one warehouse, the answer was simply: it is on backorder, you have to wait. There was no ability to pull from another location, no ability to pivot. The business was inflexible by design.

“Before, we would just tell the customer, you gotta wait, or we don’t have it. We were inflexible. Zoey created an environment so that we can pivot, and quickly move that entire sales order to another warehouse.” Michael Buis, AIRpipe USA

The director was pulled into every domestic operations decision. Nothing moved without him. That left little bandwidth to focus on growing the business, let alone establishing a strategic direction..

Why AIRpipe USA Chose Zoey

AIRpipe had been running a legacy system called DDI for order entry. When the team started looking for something better, they initially thought Finale Inventory would be the answer. Finale is strong at what it does (inventory management), but it could not handle the front-end ordering and customer communication layer the way the business needed.

Zoey’s longstanding collaboration with Finale offered a solution. Zoey became the operational hub: the system customers interact with, where orders are captured, and the source of information that keeps everyone aware of each step from the moment an order is placed to the moment it ships. Finale sits behind it, handling inventory and fulfillment. The two platforms talk to each other via FTP, syncing stock data every 10 to 15 minutes.

Zoey fulfills multiple missions: Customer facing information, order management capabilities and communicating to all parties. Distributors and CSRs alike interact directly with Zoey for everything they need.

Each platform stays in its lane. Zoey manages how orders come in (phone, email, fax, or PO/PDF) and owns all customer-facing communication. Finale manages the pick, pack, ship, and inventory reservation. Centralizing everything with Zoey and Finale unlocked a potent solution that freed up bandwidth and has scaled as the business has grown.

Best of all, as business needs materialized, Zoey is able to quickly respond to ensure no blockers are in the way of moving forward. Michael had come from environments where feature requests sat in a queue for months, or never moved at all. With Zoey, he found a partner willing to keep up with the needs of his business, instead of being a technological obstacle.

The Solution: A Lean Tech Stack Built to Scale

Implementation took roughly 3 to 4 months from real conversation to go-live. When it came time to switch, Michael built SOPs and short training videos, then made a bold decision: unplug the old system overnight and go live cold turkey. No parallel running, no extended transition.

The team was up and running in days.

Zero back-office disruption. The fulfillment team kept working exactly as they always had. No retraining, no process changes. A new system went live and they did not feel a thing. The switch was a non-event for the people doing the work on a day-to-day basis.

The integration between Zoey, Finale, and accounting solution QuickBooks Online became the operational backbone of the business. Here is how the data flows:

• Inventory sync. Via FTP, Zoey pulls real-time inventory data from Finale across all warehouses, refreshing every 10 to 15 minutes. CSRs can see exactly what is available, at which location, before committing to an order.
• Order entry. A sales order is entered in Zoey by a CSR, by phone, email, or fax.
• Fulfillment handoff. Once submitted, the order passes to Finale for pick, pack, and ship.
• Invoicing and notification. When Finale confirms shipment, it signals Zoey to invoice and trigger customer notifications automatically.
• Accounting sync. QuickBooks Online sits at the end of the chain, capturing the financial record.

The result is a tight, automated loop. Michael’s team is not copying and pasting between systems. The data moves on its own at the exact points it needs to.

What Changed for AIRpipe USA Since Adopting Zoey

When AIRpipe started with Zoey, the team was processing around 450 orders per month. In a recent month, they processed 1,100, nearly tripling the volume, with the same core customer service team.

The account base has grown just as fast. AIRpipe had just under 200 active distributor accounts when they came on board. They are at 410 today, and expanding into Central and South America.

Here is what changed operationally:

• Customers went from darkness to full visibility. Before Zoey, customers had no shipment notifications unless UPS happened to send one. Now, AIRpipe proactively sends tracking updates, including for truckload shipments, with a hyperlink with the GPS coordinates of the driver in real time. Buyers could be confident their orders were on the move.
• The team can flex across warehouses. If inventory is short at one location, a CSR can pivot the entire order to another warehouse in Zoey without the director needing to get involved. What used to be a backorder conversation is now a routing decision.
• The director got his bandwidth back. Domestic operations decisions no longer funnel up to him. That time has gone back to growth, sourcing, and expansion planning.
• Feature requests actually get implemented. With other vendors AIRpipe has worked with, requests either stall or never happen. At Zoey, turnaround runs 48 to 72 hours in most cases, sometimes faster. He broadcasts each win in the company group chat so the whole team sees Zoey delivering.

“I don’t know of any company that could meet Zoey’s response from a modification standpoint. If you’re creative and you’re making sense with your feature requests, Zoey is going to be the one.” Michael Buis, AIRpipe USA

Major Growth, with Opportunities Still Ahead

AIRpipe has not yet deployed Zoey’s self-service front end for distributors. Orders still come in through phone, email, and fax, and CSRs enter them manually. That is a deliberate choice for now, as the sales team values staying in direct contact with distributors during the order process. But with order volume nearly tripled and the account base still growing, that conversation is shifting.

The selection of Zoey has future-proofed the business as Zoey’s self-service portal is already there and part of the solution available to AIRpipe. When the time is right, there is no rebuild, no migration, no new platform to evaluate. It is a switch they can flip. That is what it means to be on a platform built for where a business is going, not just where it is today.

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