The problem
Rexel Nederland is part of the Rexel Group, an electrical engineering wholesaler active in over 26 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 more than 300,000 available products 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 tenders, line by line. This means using up to 3 minutes per product line. Dealing with a tender 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 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.
Because of the 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 made synonyms in the system for many common synonyms in the industry, this also improves the quality of matches. Next to this the solution remembers when products have been matched before, because no one likes doing the same work twice.
Mydatamatcher haves a staggering 96% success ratio on finding the right products automatically when Rexel uploads a customer request. Furthermore, when products are not relevant for the product range of Rexel, for example: a frozen chicken, the solution automatically handles them and tags these products as Not in Range. When the solution can’t with confidently decide if a product is the right match the solution suggests the best possibility. Therefore, a product expert is able to easily match the last products left of the rfq and seal the deal.
The results
- Tenders, Request for Quotations and bids automatically get matched to the large assortment of Rexel
- Product with better margins can easily be selected, depending on customer wishes
- Significant increase in efficiency for Sales
These benefits help positively influence the win rate and number of customers Sales can deal with, all while getting rid of a job Sales does not enjoy; working with product data.
