Business Soſtware
Artificial intelligence operations
Susan McLeod, industry principal sales manager at artificial intelligence soſtware company Infor, shares her insights on the possibilities of artificial intelligence in the electrical wholesale and distribution sector.
F
or a while now, artificial intelligence (AI) has been viewed by many as an exciting new technology that might be able to help a manufacturer or distributor modernise and, more importantly, digitalise its operations. Consulting firm Accenture defines AI as a constellation of technologies that allows smart machines to extend human capabilities by sensing, comprehending, acting, and learning - thereby allowing people to achieve much more.
After several decades of development, AI has embedded itself in our everyday lives. Do you unlock your phone using your face to get to your social media feed? The facial recognition and what you see on your feed are made possible through AI. When is the last time you went an entire day without using a browser search? When you are searching for things online, you are using the power of AI, which makes those search engines super fast, comprehensive, and robust. The smart devices in your home use AI to learn your patterns to maximise efficient use of energy.
So how can AI help in a distribution centre?
The answer is that AI is a tool that you can add to your digital toolbox. AI makes your operation run more efficiently on its own with parameters set by you. Here are some of the ways it can help an electrical wholesale and distribution company:
28 | electrical wholesalerApril 2023
“AI can analyse customer order patterns and optimise your inventory levels to increase sales and profitability.”
Sales recommendations: Having AI recommend items to your customers can do a couple of things for you. In self-service situations, AI can make recommendations for additional purchases based on what the customer is buying, thus increasing your company’s sales and wallet share. For counter sales, it provides similar information that the counter rep can use to make suggestions to the customer. A 30-year veteran at the counter knows what additional items their customers may need for their job, but a new employee does not have the experience, which is where AI can help.
Proactive supplier recommendations: Selecting suppliers is one of the most critical aspects of any organisation. Any inaccuracy in the supplier selection process can lead to poor supplier performance, supply disruptions, and inefficiencies in the business process. AI-powered machine learning models segment suppliers based on three metrics: promptness, quality, and quantity of other available suppliers/vendors. Discount recommendations: Using historical data of customer orders, AI learns about the customer, division, item, quantity, price, and discount for each order. It augments the business
users’ knowledge with the recommendation of maximum value that can be offered for a given order.
Inventory optimisation: There is no more significant asset on a distributor’s balance sheet than its inventory. Having the right amount of inventory in the right location is critical to supporting your customers. Too much inventory fills up your distribution centres and ties up valuable capital. Not having enough inventory prevents you from filling orders. Suppose your inventory is not in the proper distribution centres throughout your network. It can add cost and delivery time to your customer. AI can analyse your customer order patterns and optimise your inventory levels to increase sales and profitability. A distributor recently commented: “AI will absolutely continue to grow as a valuable tool for distributors, and this is a good thing as it will help distributors remain competitive in an environment that is changing rapidly. With growing competition, distributor sales reps must do what they do best - spend time with customers and sell! AI provides distributor sales reps with very straightforward direction on what steps to take to increase sales requiring no time wasted on analysing data.”
Against this backdrop, and the current economic landscape we face, it seems the time to embrace AI in the electrical wholesale sector is now.
ewnews.co.uk
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