The Designer’s Question Now Leaves a Record

A lighting designer is finishing a fixture schedule late in the afternoon. She needs three things: a valid catalog number for a wet-location downlight at 3000K, a budget price, and a lead time she can put in front of the owner.

That question has always gone to a person. She emails or calls the agency that carries the line, someone answers, and the project moves forward.

What that exchange has rarely produced is a record anyone else could read. The agency knows the designer asked, how long the answer took, what products were considered, and how it turned out. None of that was hidden. There was simply nowhere for most of it to go.

I have owned an agency and led a manufacturer’s sales organization. From both seats, the exchange looked the same: useful, consequential, and largely unrecorded.

That is changing, and not in one place.

More Than a Productivity Story

The announcements read as efficiency stories: fewer emails, faster quotes, less rekeying. That is real. “The Five Wastes Hiding in Your Quotation Process” argued that the waiting and rekeying are worth removing. The other common reading is that software will finally cut out the middle.

Neither reading is the most useful one. Different platforms are capturing the work and delivering the record to different parties. The more consequential question is how those systems connect, with each other and with the platforms manufacturers and agencies already run. The answer will help determine where the record of demand lives, who can see it, and what the channel can learn from it.

The work in the middle is staying. What is new is that the work leaves a record.

What Is Arriving

At least seven efforts are working on different parts of this path at once. Table 1 lays out many of them. Three show the range.

Sourcery and OASIS. On September 14, the two companies announced a partnership linking the workspace where lighting designers build schedules to the system OASIS describes as the operating platform behind more than 80 percent of lighting-focused rep agencies in North America. Requests for product information, samples, budget pricing, and availability are intended to route to the agency carrying the line in that territory. Specifiers control what project data they share. The stated goal is a traceable path from design intent toward order. Pilots are slated to begin this fall.

Parspec. Parspec approaches the problem from the bid and quotation side. It raised a $20 million Series A in July 2025, saying at the time that four of the five largest U.S. electrical distributors use its tools. This year it released Sales Management, developed with input from 16 lighting agencies, to address agency quoting, orders, and commissions.

ProjectNexus. This one is different. In May, NAED selected a joint venture of IDEA and Pull Logic to develop what its sponsors describe as an industry-owned middleware solution for order and shipment visibility from manufacturer to job site. NAED initiated the effort, with NEMA, NECA, and NEMRA participating in shaping requirements and governance. Access is role-based, and IDEA reports 298 branch locations participating in the pilot or committed to beta. ProjectNexus starts later in the process, at the purchase order. It addresses the delivery half of the certainty that “The New Currency of the Electrical Channel: Certainty” described: where is my stuff?

Around those efforts sit Repfabric, The Lighting Exchange, chatLED, Electrify Connect, manufacturer-sponsored platforms, and established design software. chatLED states the manufacturer’s interest unusually directly: “PDF Spec Sheets Don’t Tell You Who Is Specifying Your Products. We Do.”

Table 1. MAG interpretation of public product descriptions as of September 2026. The list is not exhaustive, and this is not a statement of contractual data rights or terms.

The Integration Question

None of this arrives on empty ground. Larger manufacturers have long sponsored their own business platforms. Acuity’s Agile is a familiar example: agents quote and manage orders within the manufacturer’s system while often maintaining their own agency systems.

Design software sits further upstream. AGi32, from Lighting Analysts, now part of the CPQ company Revalize, and Visual, from Acuity, are used for lighting calculations and layouts with photometric data from multiple manufacturers.

Some bridges already exist. Repfabric describes integrations with OASIS and manufacturer CRM platforms. Electrify Connect describes ERP connectivity. The Lighting Exchange feeds manufacturer and agency websites. Sourcery is connecting directly to OASIS. What is not yet visible publicly is an architecture connecting the broader design-to-order chain across these emerging platforms.

An agency may soon touch the same project through half a dozen systems, from a manufacturer’s platform to the fulfillment tools downstream. Without broader integration, the same schedule can still be entered more than once while no participant sees the complete path.

That is why ProjectNexus is worth watching beyond the fulfillment problem it was built to solve. The fulfillment half of the path is getting an industry-sponsored middleware effort. The demand-creation half is still developing largely through private platforms and point-to-point connections, each solving a legitimate piece of the problem.

Why Integration Will Not Happen on Its Own

The gaps are not simply an accident of timing. Every participant has some reason to be the place where the project lives.

Platforms overlap. Parspec’s Sales Management and OASIS both address important parts of an agency’s quoting, order, and commission workflow. That puts them in competition for at least part of the same operating territory, and it reduces the incentive for either to make the other indispensable.

Manufacturers weigh control against reach. A manufacturer that sponsors its own platform built it to make its line easier to do business with and to see its own business more clearly. Opening it to outside systems can improve the channel’s workflow. It can also extend access to information the manufacturer has invested in capturing. Keeping it closed preserves control but may ask the agency to enter the same project somewhere else.

Neither choice is inherently wrong. Each is a commercial decision, and it helps to call it one.

Integration costs money. Connections have to be built, secured, and maintained. Public announcements rarely say who will pay for connections that benefit more than one party.

The agency has the most to gain from insisting. The participant with perhaps the strongest reason to demand interoperability is the agency, because it has to work across several of these systems at once. An agency choosing among new tools can make connection to its existing systems, and to the platforms its principals require, part of the purchase decision. Manufacturers can make the same demand of the portals and systems they adopt. Vendors ultimately respond to requirements customers are willing to enforce.

The channel’s history points the same way. NEMRA’s point-of-sale reporting standards are one example of the channel coalescing around a shared reporting structure, with continued endorsement from NAED. ProjectNexus exists because NAED’s board authorized a co-investment with IDEA and Pull Logic, a judgment that order and shipment visibility required a shared solution and not another isolated system.

An adjacent channel has gone further. In foodservice equipment, which is also specified by consultants and sold through reps, the rep association MAFSI launched SpecPath in 2016 to track projects by specification, origination, and destination credit. Consultants can participate at no charge, parties receive access according to their role, and MAFSI reports more than 1,600 users.

Foodservice is a different market with its own specification community, so this is a precedent, not a template. It does show that a shared demand-creation record is possible when enough participants decide they need one.

Every platform has a reason to be the hub. The project needs them to connect.

What the Record Changes

An agency’s position has traditionally rested on three things:

• Relationships with specifiers, contractors, and distributors.
• Labor: the quoting, crossing, submitting, and chasing.
• Information. In rep-led specifications, the agency commonly knows which designer is working on which project with which products before that information becomes broadly visible elsewhere.

The first advantage is largely untouched. The second is being automated, which is good news for a quote desk running days behind. The third is beginning to shift from individual and organizational knowledge into structured data. That is a reading of how these products are designed, not yet a measured market outcome.

Three consequences are worth watching.

1. Responsiveness becomes visible line by line

“When Enough Is Enough” argued that a long line card makes it difficult to give every line a champion. Neither side has historically had a good way to see where attention actually goes. A routed request with a timestamp begins to make that visible.

For an agency that answers quickly, provides useful alternatives, and protects specifications, that is an opportunity. A record can document work the agency has often struggled to demonstrate.

2. Spec hold rate becomes computable

Manufacturers typically cannot report how many specifications survive to purchase order. One reason is structural: the design-phase record and the order record live in different places. A traceable path from schedule to order could make that report possible, but only if those records connect.

The same crossing capability that finds a compliant alternative quickly is valuable at buyout. It can also make substitution easier. That is a property of the capability, not necessarily the intention of anyone who built it. It is also a reason for manufacturers and agencies to measure specification hold together.

3. Specification credit gets better evidence

The Manufacturers’ Agents National Association (MANA) describes the familiar problem: front-end work occurs in one territory, the purchase order is placed in another, and the destination may be in a third. Commission credit then has to recognize the parties that contributed to the sale. The Electronics Representatives Association (ERA), writing about its own industry, similarly recommends that manufacturers have a formal system for tracking split influence and commission credit.

A time-stamped record showing which specifier contacted which agency about which project does not settle the commission question by itself. It does create better evidence. That gives agencies doing specification work firmer ground and helps manufacturers decide how influence should be credited. It also gives the underlying record economic value, which is another reason to establish access and ownership expectations early.

The Strongest Objection

The strongest objection is that the channel has heard versions of this story before. The adoption figures cited here all come from the vendors and sponsors themselves. The Sourcery and OASIS pilots have not yet begun. Designers still call the people they trust.

A complicated project still needs someone who can work through substitutions, lead times, incomplete documents, budget pressure, and everything else that does not fit neatly into a field on a screen. I made essentially that argument about distributors in a recent piece, and it applies equally to reps.

All of that is correct, and none of it conflicts with the central point. Software does not replace the middle. The middle keeps doing much of the work while more of that work creates a record. The value of that record depends on whether the systems connect and on the rules governing who can use what they capture.

Three things would materially change this view:

• Evidence that these platforms already connect across the broader design-to-order chain more extensively than their public descriptions indicate.
• Evidence that specifiers do not adopt the new workflows in meaningful numbers.
• Evidence that greater visibility into specification activity does not change manufacturer or agency behavior.

Public evidence is not yet sufficient to resolve any of those questions, which is why the decisions being made now matter.

Four Questions Before the Next Platform Agreement

• How does it connect to what we already run, and who pays for the connection?

List the systems a project already touches. Ask which connections exist today, which are planned, who builds them, and who maintains them.

• Who holds the record, and who can see it?

Name the system writing the request, response, and outcome. Project-level, specifier-level, and line-level visibility are different things. Settle the access rules before go-live, in writing, just as “Channel Conflict” argued that a national-account definition needs to be visible to both sides.

• What does it measure, and have we agreed that is what good means?

Response time is easy to count, which is precisely the risk “The KPI Trap” described. A one-hour answer offering the wrong product is worth less than a next-day answer that solves the problem and holds the specification. Agree on the outcomes the record is intended to inform before anyone is measured by it.

• What happens to the record when the relationship changes?

A line is resigned. An agency is acquired. A manufacturer changes representatives. A platform is replaced. Agreements written before this kind of project-level record existed may not address it explicitly. Data access, retention, portability, and permitted use belong in the agreement, with counsel’s review, before they become a dispute.

What Has Not Changed

The designer still needs a part number, a price, and a date. She will still value the person who answers quickly, understands the application, and gives her an answer she can trust.

What changes is that the asking, the answering, and eventually the outcome leave something behind. The channel still has to agree on what it is allowed to mean.