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providing Automation Studio technology to connect to their OnePlace product information management system, and enhance their member’s ability to transfer and integrate data across the supply chain. “Currently, we’re working towards Automation Studio being fully compatible with BisTrack across the timber and building supply community and we’re continuously engaging with customers to make improvements and process integration (PI) enhancements that will make it more effective. We hope to be able to provide further updates over the coming months.” Like Epicor, KCS has also worked closely with the NMBS on integrating its OnePlace catalogue solution.
“This enables members to view product details and images online and to easily adopt them for processing within their business system,” said Mr Mitchell. “We do see the importance of integrated product catalogues. This is used extensively in other markets that we serve, where it has really served as a catalyst to building a complete digital supply chain. We are strong advocates of the European Technical Information Model (ETIM) initiative and we will continue to focus efforts on catalogue solutions over the coming years. “We have broadened our electronic funds transfer (EFT) offering and now support integrated solutions from Dojo and WorldPay,” he added. “These are being steadily rolled out across our customer base.” The company has also formalised relationships with a number of other partners, such as What3Words for deliveries. KCS is rolling out the latest version of K8 to its customer base, promising innovations including enhanced product search capabilities, to automation of the accounts payable process, extended rebate management, improved delivery planning and management, product proposals and additional application programming interface (API) capabilities.
And in the coming year, the company says it will bring to market a new platform that will enable it to adopt other partner solutions quickly and to streamline the integration process that can be both costly and time consuming.
“This will not only give us an economy of scale across all of our solutions and speed up the time to market for new partnerships, it will ensure that our customers can quickly get real benefits from these as well,” said Mr Mitchell. “Our efforts will continue to make available industry specific solutions to our customers that will support their digital transformation journeys. All of this with the objectives of sustainability and profitability in mind.”
AI has really hit the headlines in recent months and it’s fair to say it has had some
Above left: Epicor’s Adam Lee says the company’s goal is to help its customers grow Above right: Ten-25’s Ian Oldrey says the company has added more functionality to Merchanter
www.ttjonline.com | July/August 2023 | TTJ
pretty negative publicity. But it will bring benefits – provided it is used wisely. “Like every human invention ever, it comes with some fairly miraculous upsides and some fairly terrifying potential pitfalls,” said Mr Oldrey (see also feature p74). “When it comes to the ability to take in large amounts of data, crunch it and distil it down into useful and tangible actions I can see a lot of positivity to come out of AI. I can see it starting to be that trusted adviser to give all the smart answers that are needed to be refining what stock profile you have, which customers you need to be targeting and where prices need to sit in order to be in a good position in the market. I can see things like that being incredibly powerful. “At a wider level, AI has concerns,” added Mr Oldrey. “One of the things that worries me is the idea that if it doesn’t know the answer it starts to make things up – it wants to please you. The problem with that is that if you are using it, for example, for stock projection and it says ‘I’m sure we’re going to sell loads of these next month so let’s order loads in’, if it’s barking up the wrong tree and just thinks it’s giving you a smart answer then that is potentially a dangerous road. Like all technologies that come along, we need to learn to work with it, to iron out stuff it doesn’t do so well and mature in our use of it.”
KCS has not yet adopted AI technology within its systems but says its technical and business teams are constantly looking for ways it can be used to the benefit of its customers.
“We are all witnessing the acceleration of the development of AI and it’s certainly an interesting field,” said James Mitchell. “As this technology matures, we can see that it can offer tremendous opportunities, so we will embrace it at the right time, as and when of benefit.”
Epicor already has a grounding in AI, having developed its own chatbot and explored the applications of natural language processing (NLP). “AI has developed rapidly over the past 12 months, and we’ve been working with our timber trade customers to help them understand and harness these emerging technologies,” said Adam Lee. “We recently hosted a large customer event where we discussed OpenAI integrations, having AI do more complicated calculations such as material requirements planning (MRP) processing,” he added. “We’ve also been expanding our expertise in predictive analytics, acquiring Grow Inc, back in March 2022 — a no-code, full- stack business intelligence (BI) platform that empowers users to make data-driven decisions. We’ve begun to integrate the Grow Inc platform with BisTrack, using the technology to enable customers to access dashboards and pre-built analytics in the Cloud and receive predictive analysis of their data.
“While the future of AI and its applications is still unknown, we’re committed to working with our customers to understand and embrace these new technologies as a force for good,” said Mr Lee. ■
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