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Todd Fischer
VP and Corporate Information Officer, Endries International Inc.
Endries International is a premier global distributor specializing in fasteners, screws, nuts, bolts, and related C-class components. Founded in 1970 and headquartered in Brillion, Wisconsin, Endries has emerged as a key player in the distribution of industrial supplies, serving OEM manufacturers in a wide array of sectors such as industrial and agricultural equipment, commercial and residential refrigeration, and HVAC, and more.
What started as a small family-run operation, Endries has scaled to a $500 million by working with OEMs and manages over 750,000 SKUs for fasteners and related products. What sets Endries apart is their innovative vendor-managed inventory program that utilizes the latest industrial IoT technology to safeguard their customers’ production lines.
Supernova Award Category:
The Problem:
Endries is dedicated to delivering the right components at the right price and time to OEM manufacturing production lines. Beyond being a distribution company, we pride ourselves on being a solution provider, with our people as key differentiators. Our customer and employee retention are closely linked, with long-term employees fostering long-term customer relationships. With exponential growth in the last three years, labor shortage has been a big challenge. Seventy percent of our products are unique to each customer, requiring substantial resources to maintain high service standards. We can't add headcount with each new customer, so we need to work smarter through technology.
Our strategy is to let computers handle tasks suited for automation so we can scale resources and free up employee time to engage in more meaningful work such as connecting with customers. We believe that more engaging work will increase employee retention and attract new talent.
Areas for productivity improvement included slow search and analysis processes, which consumed thousands of man-hours annually and caused employee fatigue. Quickly searching for and identifying part matches within our expanding item master database of 750,000 SKUs stressed our employees. Additionally, tracking and searching for customer documents scattered across the organization frustrated them. By addressing these inefficiencies with technology, we aim to create a more productive and satisfying work environment.
The Solution:
Infor’s platform extensibility includes AI and RPA processes, this presented an opportunity to advance productivity goals for employee retention by completing work faster and with greater accuracy.
Annually, over 150,000 computer searches are conducted to match parts for sales inquiries, RFQs, and database parts merging. A single part search based on keywords can take up to 30 minutes due to the various ways customers or vendors describe a fastener with over 50 attributes and user skill levels. Infor AI has significantly reduced the search time, using an algorithm that delivers a shortlist of the best matches.
Previously, our process for managing thousands of customer inventory commitment forms (ICF) was inefficient, consuming thousands of hours to process, track, and locate documents, with 20% remaining unclosed. Infor RPA has automated this process, digitizing, and indexing ICF documents in Infor Document Management, making them trackable and locatable within seconds.
The Results:
We chose AI part matching as our 1st use case because it significantly boosted productivity for over 500 users in Sales, Procurement, Operations, and Inventory. The inefficiencies not only affected productivity but also impacted customer win rates and inventory costs. Previously, completing a 500-part quote for an RFQ took 3 days. With Infor AI, this process now takes one day, allowing us to engage with customers sooner and provide more personalized, high-quality quotes, improving win rates.
Over the past several years, we have acquired 12 companies, each requiring us to match and merge up to 50,000 parts in our item master database. A stressful task for our employees, leading to the accumulation of duplicate parts over time that drive up our inventory costs. Infor AI has accelerated this process, allowing us to efficiently manage each acquisition, eliminate existing duplicates, and maintain a clean database moving forward.
We implemented an RPA for ICF management because our salespeople didn’t have a streamlined process to close ICFs, causing millions of dollars in inventory costs and dissatisfied customers. Delays in following up on open ICFs left customers with budget issues or obsolete inventory. With Infor RPA, ICFs are automatically centralized in IDM with the necessary metadata for tracking and locating, ensuring that ICFs are 100% closed. Result, lower inventory costs, happier salespeople because they can now better serve customers.
Metrics:
Before implementing AI, the time required to match a part depended on the user's skill level and keyword usage, it was error-prone creating duplicate parts if the part existed. Customers or vendors describe fasteners differently, causing the system to generate an extensive list of results. Users had to refine their searches repeatedly until a match was found, relying heavily on their knowledge of the system, customers, and products. With AI, the need for specialized skills is eliminated. The system understands various abbreviations and prioritizes them, producing a shorter, more accurate list of matches.
• 50-65% faster parts matching for a single item search
• Higher project completion rates with faster 200+ bulk parts matching
• 30% increase in customer win rates
• 7,500+ hours saved annually
• Under 90 days to implement
Before implementing RPA, ICFs were stored on computers or filing cabinets, lacking a triggering mechanism for timely customer follow-ups. Documents were not linked to part numbers, making it difficult for purchasing to locate to verify order requests. With Infor RPA, ICFs are automatically centralized in IDM, complete with metadata to notify users of customer touchpoints and to locate documents for processing committed orders.
• 100% closed commitments save millions of dollars in inventory cost
• 1,200 hours saved annually in managing ICF documents
• Less than one month to implement
The Technology:
Infor AI and RPA can be utilized no matter where the application or data resides as we are operating in a hybrid environment. Infor AI employs a proprietary ensemble pattern-matching solution that can leverage as little information as the part description to return accurate matches. Infor RPA creates bot processes to digitize and centralize documents in Infor IDM leveraging optical character recognition (OCR), sophisticated document analysis, text processing, and AI/ML extraction activities.
Disruptive Factor:
We recognized the potential of Infor's tools to achieve productivity goals, but we lacked the resources to start these projects since all our people were working on our ERP cloud migration. We didn’t have a team of data analysts and data scientists at Endries to effectively identify the right AI use cases and implement them successfully.
We learned of Infor’s Augmented Intelligence Service (AIS), a subscription service that brings the people, processes, and technology needed to transform our ideas into real AI processes in an accelerated fashion. In the past, we were hesitant to work with other solution providers due to the complexity of working with multiple vendors, and different technology platforms and integrating them.
This is a continuous journey, not a one-off project, with each phase completed within 90 days. Example, AI parts matching was just the 1st stage. We are now creating AI to estimate the cost of a new part, removing the need to get this from the supplier. When you're able to do that, it’s a game-changer to provide a quote in minutes or hours.
Speed is crucial for our customers, and we are aiming to let AI make decisions, so customers simply upload a list of 500+ SKUs and receive instant quotes from AI. Once we complete this project, we will start another project. We may come back to the first project and refine it. It's a continuous process improvement. This dynamic approach is very exciting for our organization.
Shining Moment:
Our CEO had a positive experience with RPA in his previous role, so we trusted the technology and quickly initiated our first Infor RPA project for ICF. The user-friendly nature of the tool allowed me to implement it in just a few weeks, sparking a wave of RPA requests from other departments, including a recently deployed proof of delivery document management system. I am proud that employees recognize the value of RPA, as these projects are spreading rapidly across our organization.
About Endries International Inc.
Since our founding in 1970, we've worked hard to build a legacy of quality, service, and innovation. As a key part of that effort, we've cultivated a trusted, global sourcing and supply network that helps us provide high-quality fastners and related components, and seamless, reliable fulfillment solutions to our OEM customers.
