Gearcor PRO vs. Hanes Supply:
where we actually stand
GME Supply launched Gearcor PRO on 11 August 2026, a single ordering platform spanning GME Supply, Columbia Safety and Farwest Line Specialties. This document compares it feature by feature against what Hanes Supply runs today, and recommends what to do about it.
Everything below rests on two sources: GME's own published material, and our project documentation for the Hanes platform. Where we are not certain, we say so.
1The bottom line
Three findings that change how the rest of this should be read.
Gearcor PRO has no punchout, and does not claim to
We read GME's launch announcement and their full product page end to end. There is no mention of punchout, cXML, Ariba, Coupa, EDI or ERP integration anywhere in either. Gearcor PRO is a portal that asks the utility's buyers to leave their own purchasing system and come into GME's. That is the opposite of what punchout does.
Hanes already has punchout, for one customer, and only half of it
Punchout is live in production today for Alstom, running over SAP Ariba through TradeCentric. But it only returns the shopping cart. The order comes back as a PDF and the sales team re-keys it by hand. That manual step is the single thing preventing punchout from scaling to a second, fifth or twentieth utility.
The real gap is programme management, not plumbing
Where Gearcor PRO is genuinely strong is in running a customer's gear programme: org charts, budgets, approvals, curated kits, spend reporting. Most of that is standard Adobe Commerce B2B functionality that Hanes already licenses and has not switched on or promoted. It is configuration and merchandising, not a platform rebuild.
In one line: Hanes is not behind Gearcor PRO on technology. Hanes is behind on packaging and promotion, and ahead on the two things utilities actually sign contracts over: connecting to their purchasing system, and quote to order.
2What Gearcor PRO is
Launched 11 August 2026. Free to use, no contract, no minimums, sales-led onboarding.
Gearcor PRO merges GME's two legacy ordering systems into one. Customers keep their existing logins, and pricing, catalogues and order history were migrated across. Onboarding is deliberately human: a demo with a "Gear Expert" lasting 30 to 60 minutes, an account build over one to two days, then a review session and go-live.
Their positioning is sharp, and worth reading closely because it describes how utility buying actually works:
The whole platform is built around that observation. Their headline capabilities:
- Organisational mapping, with groups, departments and regions mirroring the customer's org chart
- More than 20 permissions with ready-made role templates such as "AP Specialist" and "Read-Only Buyer"
- Company catalogues: curated, custom-priced storefronts, role-specific kits, footwear and FR apparel programmes
- Task inbox with multi-level approvals, routed by dollar threshold or management chain, with live notification badges
- Saved and assigned carts, including carts a GME rep builds and pushes into the customer's account
- Self-service finance: line-item invoices, spend export by group, department and region, tax exemption certificates
- Five years of order history, searchable by PO number, product or keyword
- Co-branded storefront carrying the customer's own logo
- Custom apparel programme with branded hi-vis and FR workwear, managed sizing across crews and locations, automatic reorders
3Feature by feature
Sized S small, M medium, L large. Sizes are directional only and are not estimates.
| Gearcor PRO capability | Hanes today | What that means | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account structure and control | |||
| Organisational mapping by group, department, region | Own it | Standard Adobe Commerce B2B company hierarchy. Company accounts are already in use, since the Alstom punchout binds to one. Needs enabling and promoting more widely. | S |
| Roles and granular permissions | Own it | Native. What we lack is Gearcor's named templates. Pre-built roles remove the hardest part of onboarding a 400-person utility. | S |
| Company catalogues with contract pricing | Partly | Shared Catalogs are native and contract pricing already flows from the ERP. The gap is adoption as a customer-facing, curated "approved gear only" programme. | M |
| Ordering and approvals | |||
| Multi-level approvals by dollar threshold | Own it | Native Adobe Commerce B2B approval rules. Configuration, not development. | S |
| Task inbox with live notification badges | Gap | Approvals work but are invisible, so an approver has to go looking. A badge-driven inbox is a small change with a large effect on how fast orders clear. | S |
| Saved and named carts for reorder | Own it | Requisition Lists, already live and already covered in the regression suite. | S |
| Rep-assigned carts pushed to the customer | Partly | Shared Quote already does this from the ERP side. Extending it so a rep can push a cart directly into a customer account closes the gap and then beats it. | M |
| PO number, job name and attachments at checkout | Own it | The PO payment method is native, and order-attribute and attachment extensions are already installed. | S |
| Finance and visibility | |||
| Self-service line-item invoicing | Partly | Kodaris already provides invoice, order and balance access. Whether it reaches full line-item self-service needs confirming with the Hanes team. | M |
| Five-year order history searchable by PO | Gap | The data lives in the ERP and Sirius can already serve order history. This is surfacing and search, not new architecture. Utilities ask for it constantly during audits. | M |
| Spend reporting, budget against actual | Gap | Not available today. This is the reporting layer finance and safety managers use to justify the programme internally, so it is a genuine competitive weakness. | M |
| Multi-state tax exemption certificates | Partly | Avalara AvaTax is already installed. Adding self-service certificate management extends an existing relationship rather than introducing a new vendor. | S |
| Early-pay discount of 1 percent by ACH | Gap | A commercial decision, not a technical one. Worth noting that Hanes offers something GME does not, since Credit Key B2B financing is already live. | S |
| Connecting to the customer's purchasing system | |||
| Punchout, cart into the buyer's system | Ahead | Live for Alstom over SAP Ariba via TradeCentric. GME has nothing comparable. This is a real advantage that is currently invisible to the market. | n/a |
| Punchout, order placed automatically | Gap | The critical one. Orders return as PDFs and are re-keyed by hand. See section 4. | M |
| Product classification and customer part numbers | Gap | Large utilities require standard product codes and a cross-reference to their own part numbers. Neither is in place. This is catalogue data work across roughly 85,000 items, and it is the most common reason a completed punchout fails the customer's own testing. | L |
| Programme and brand | |||
| Co-branded storefront carrying the customer logo | Gap | Cheap to build, high perceived value, and very sticky with utility safety managers. | S |
| Custom apparel programme with managed sizing | Gap | This is a business decision before it is a technology one, namely whether Hanes wants to run branded apparel and sizing programmes at all. | L |
| Quote to order | Ahead | Shared Quote, a one-click order from an ERP-generated quote carrying negotiated pricing and off-catalogue items, is more advanced than anything Gearcor PRO markets. | n/a |
Reading the table: of 18 capabilities, Hanes already owns or partly owns 11 and is ahead on 2. The genuine build items number five: the task inbox, order history search, spend reporting, the co-branded storefront, and catalogue classification data. Only the last of those is large.
4The one that matters: punchout stops at the PDF
Why punchout has not scaled past a single customer, and what unlocks it.
Punchout today works exactly as far as the cart. Our own documentation records the limitation plainly:
The reason is sound, and it is a Hanes business decision. Order entry needs to see what is being bought and check stock so the order goes to the right warehouse. Nobody wants an automated order shipping from the wrong branch.
But the cost of that decision is high, and it compounds. Every punchout order consumes sales-team time. That is tolerable for one customer. At five customers it becomes a headcount problem, and at twenty it is unworkable. Manual re-keying is the reason punchout has not been sold to a second utility.
Here is why this is now solvable. Every piece already exists or is already specified:
Recommendation: treat Shop by Warehouse not as a storefront nicety but as the unlock for punchout at scale. It is the highest-leverage item on this entire list, because it converts a capability we already own from a one-customer special case into a repeatable sales proposition.
One caveat to weigh. Some orders will always need human judgement, including split shipments, unusual freight and non-stock items. The goal is not to remove the sales team from the loop. It is to make manual handling the exception rather than every single order.
5Where the competition actually stands
We checked all four named competitors, not only GME.
| Company | Punchout | What we found |
|---|---|---|
| GME Supply and Farwest Gearcor PRO |
No | A strong programme-management portal. No connection to the customer's purchasing system in any published material. |
| Irby Utilities Sonepar |
Yes | A dedicated punchout and EDI page with a "Get Started" call to action. This is a Sonepar-wide capability rather than an Irby differentiator, but it is publicly marketed, which is the part that matters. |
| DiVal Safety | No | Punchout does not appear anywhere in their published services. Their integration story is vending and managed inventory, which is a different play entirely. |
| SafetyTest and Equipment | No | A working webstore, but no punchout offering found. |
| Hanes Supply | Half | Live with Alstom over SAP Ariba, cart transfer only, and not mentioned anywhere on our website. |
Two things stand out. First, nobody in this vertical names the purchasing systems they support, not Irby and not Graybar. They market punchout as a capability and handle the specifics in the sales conversation. That is a very low bar to clear.
Second, and this deserves a hard look: if GME has no punchout at all, then accounts lost to Gearcor PRO are not being lost on procurement connectivity. They are more likely being lost on the apparel and kit-management programme, or on the sheer polish of the buying experience. That is a different fight and it needs a different response.
6Recommended sequence
Ordered by leverage, not by effort.
- Publish a punchout page on hanessupply.com. We have the capability and say nothing about it. A buyer's procurement team searching for it finds nothing and assumes the answer is no. Irby's version is a single page. This is a marketing task measured in days.
- Audit the existing punchout setup: the TradeCentric contract tier, which modules are active, and when it was last exercised in production. The modules on the platform are several versions behind current.
- Protect it through the Sirius Phase 2 cutover. Punchout is already on the go-live regression list. Make sure at least one live session is tested against Sirius rather than the legacy connector, since the changeover could break the order path silently.
- Switch on and promote the B2B features already licensed: company hierarchy, curated catalogues, approval rules and requisition lists. Then say so publicly, the way Gearcor does.
- Shop by Warehouse, already specified and refined. The unlock for everything in section 4.
- Turn on automated punchout order receipt once warehouse routing is solved, removing the PDF re-keying step.
- Build a punchout onboarding runbook and name an owner. Each utility is its own credential exchange, test cycle and sign-off. Expect several weeks of calendar time per customer, driven by their IT availability rather than ours.
- Task inbox with notification badges, the cheapest visible win on the list.
- Catalogue classification and customer part-number cross-reference, starting with the top few hundred items per target account rather than the whole catalogue.
- Rep-assigned carts. Extend Shared Quote so a Hanes rep can push a cart into a customer's account. This is the single feature that would put Hanes visibly ahead of Gearcor PRO.
- Five-year order history search by PO number, and spend reporting by group, department and region.
- Co-branded storefront, self-service tax exemption certificates, and checkout file attachments. Small items with high perceived value.
- A decision on the apparel and kit programme, meaning whether Hanes wants to compete on that ground at all. This is a commercial question, not a technical one, and it should be answered before anyone estimates it.
7What we need to confirm
Open questions. We would rather flag these than guess.
- Which B2B features are genuinely in customer use today? Company accounts are confirmed in use. Whether curated catalogues and approval rules are actively used by real customers, as opposed to simply being available, we could not verify from documentation alone.
- What does the current TradeCentric contract cover, and what would it cost to activate automated order receipt?
- How much sales-team time does punchout re-keying consume today? That number is the business case for section 4, and only Hanes can supply it.
- How far does Kodaris go on invoicing, to full line-item self-service or to balances and documents only?
- Which accounts are actually under pressure, and what did their procurement teams ask for? The word punchout in a tender can mean anything from a shopping session to a full electronic document exchange.
- Is Hanes being beaten on procurement connectivity, or on the gear programme? The evidence says GME has no punchout at all, which suggests the loss driver may sit somewhere other than where it appears.