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How automation made it possible to speed up the search for similar products 17,000 times (from three working days to five seconds), regardless of the sales manager's qualifications.
The goal of automating any process is to remove restrictions on business scaling. In the case of the Russian Association of Electrotechnical Companies (abbreviated. RAEC), such a restriction was the qualifications of sales managers. To fulfill complex orders, RAEC companies had to hire, train, retain and, at times, overload managers with trained memory and a deep understanding of the field.
In this article, Andrey Putin, Managing Partner at KT.team, explains how automation was able to speed up the search for similar products 17,000 times (from three business days to five seconds), regardless of the sales manager's qualifications.
Let's imagine a situation: you want to buy a batch of 500 Philips bulbs with a nominal power of 60 W for the E27 base, but the seller does not have such bulbs in stock. The seller offers you to find an analogue, but it delays you for three or even a whole week.
What are you going to do? It seems that light bulbs are not such a rare product to hold on to the (far from) only available seller with your hands and feet, obediently waiting for his verdict for weeks. It's easier to contact another supplier who has the right product in stock or at least can quickly find a replacement for it.
And the payment for seller No. 1's slowness is the company's falling revenue, reputation among customers, and product turnover.
What should seller No. 1 do? It seems that well-trained counselors can save him — and it will work out until a certain point. But inflating the staff of consultants and resources to train them will result in a budget drain when the number of branches or nomenclature exceeds the point of no return.
RAEC, a major association of distributors of electrical products, addressed KT.team with a similar problem. The client's portfolio includes about 30 suppliers and 2 million titles, which are constantly updated and supplemented.
No sales manager can accurately remember all 2 million components. If for some reason the right product was not in stock in the right configuration or quantity, even the most qualified and attentive manager had to spend long hours selecting analogues. He had to remember not only all possible analogues, but also check their price, availability in the company's warehouses, and turnover for a specific item.
Okay, light bulbs are really a pretty simple product. But if the buyer needed a protective shutdown device whose nominal current and voltage are rigidly fixed, and the price and the shutdown current were set to an acceptable range, then the order had to be queued up with the most qualified manager who would not be mistaken in technical nuances. It took several days to solve the problem.
What problems did this create?
Taking into account the specifics of the business of members of the Russian Association of Electrical Engineering Companies, we have identified four main criteria for such software:
Different distributors that are members of the association could write the same component in their systems in different ways, with different attributes and names. Therefore, an important task on the way to MVP was to unify the entire database of two million titles. The KT.team programmed the new structure in the Pimcore PIM system and linked it via API to the company's database and distribution systems.
The next step is to create rules for selecting analogues for each subcategory of components together with the company's specialists. The entire search system is based on these rules: as soon as products appear in the distributor's database, they are automatically uploaded to Pimcore via the API. Then the system automatically categorizes components and selects analogues for them.
Three months later, we launched MVP systems for the Lighting Engineering category. And for the remaining 13 categories of components, RAEC employees themselves could now customize the search logic without the help of IT specialists:
KT.team, together with RAEC specialists, has built a smart system for instant search for analogues of electrical components. Automating an important business process has made sales many times more efficient.
We took this requirement into account, so that any changes in the component's characteristics are synchronized by the system in Pimcore, and database updates are launched every 8 hours.
The new system for selecting analogues has allowed RAEC member companies to increase the efficiency of customer service and the turnover of goods in stocks, balance the burden on managers, and avoid reputational costs and customer outflow.
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