Supporting Rexel in finding the right products for bids and request for quotations
Rexel Group is an electrical engineering wholesaler active in over 19 countries worldwide. The company supplies products for a number of different sectors: construction, industry, utility and retail.
As with many distributors and wholesale organisations with a vast product range, Rexel has to deal with large offer requests and market baskets. With a range of millions of available products per country, finding the right match between the customer request and the products available can be a very time-consuming task.
Many wholesalers use self-made Excel based or very basic solutions to find the right products. Then there is the old school way of using Vertical look up and using product experts to go through customer requests and bids, line by line. This means using up to 3 minutes per product line. Dealing with a Request for Quotation of 1,000 products would take a full work week.
As one of the market leaders in electrical and electrotechnical materials Rexel realised that this is a process where a lot of efficiency could be won.
The solution
In 2021 Rexel started using Mydatamatcher for this process. This simply means that they are now able to upload the Excel and PDF based ‘shopping list’ and Mydatamatcher does the time-consuming task of cross referencing.
These shopping lists contain tens till thousands of products. Because these lists are often extracted from customers their ERP- or PIM- systems they contain a lot of mistakes but also missing information. From slashes and stripes in attributes till missing information like no brands, dimensions or product numbers.
Through AI and smart algorithms used by Mydatamatcher the solution is able to find the right products based on the limited number of attributes which are mentioned by the customer. Mydatamatcher recognises product numbers, brand names, dimensions, product categories and text. Rexel also added synonyms in the system for common synonyms in the industry, this further improves the quality of matches. Since no one likes doing the same work twice, Mydatamatcher remembers previously offered products, increasing efficiency over time..
Due to the fact that this was a bottleneck in multiple countries, Rexel decided to roll out Mydatamatcher globally. Teams throughout Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific now use the solution to streamline their product matching processes, allowing them to handle customer requests with minimal manual effort.
For example, in one country, a request containing thousands of products previously took multiple weeks to process manually. With Mydatamatcher, this was reduced to just a few hours – 96% of time saved. Similar efficiency gains were seen across different cases, where what used to take days or even weeks could now be completed in a fraction of the time. The biggest impact comes from automating product matching, which drastically reduces manual workload and ensures faster responses to customer requests.
With these efficiency gains, Rexel’s sales and quoting teams can focus on value-added tasks rather than manually matching products—leading to faster responses, improved customer satisfaction, and ultimately, higher revenue.
The results
- Request for Quotations and bids automatically get matched to the large assortments of Rexel companies and countries
- Product with better margins can easily be selected, depending on customer wishes
- Significant increase in efficiency for sales and quoting teams
These benefits help positively influence the win rate and number of customers sales can deal with, all while getting rid of a job sales and quoting teams do not enjoy; working with low quality product data.
