Industry
In distribution, the quality of the data decides who answers first.
A distributor of electronic components and systems with 350 employees: more than 150 manufacturers in the line card, Microsoft Dynamics 365 as ERP, Akeneo as PIM, a web shop, Salesforce in sales. Every week brings new data sheets as PDFs, new price lists as Excel files in thirty formats, bills of materials with 400 lines and discontinuation notices from manufacturers. Product management types in attributes by hand, the sales office looks for alternatives, and the enquiry from France waits until someone has time. AI in distribution and wholesale therefore means, first of all: importing data and answering enquiries, around the clock.
Workflows
Five workflows that pay off in distribution
Distribution is data work at volume, with clear rules. That is exactly the ground on which an AI workflow works reliably. The analysis shows which workflows pay off for you.
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Taking data sheets into the PIM
Manufacturer portals, PDF data sheets, PIM, ETIM classes
A distributor with a broad line card typically adds hundreds of new items every month, many with nothing but a PDF data sheet. The workflow reads the data sheet, assigns the item to an ETIM class, fills in the attributes and writes product texts in your languages. It checks units, value ranges and contradictions between the table and the running text. Anything it cannot assign with certainty goes to product management with a note of where it appears in the data sheet.
Texts and content at scaleService -
Importing manufacturer price lists
Excel, CSV, BMEcat, ERP conditions
Every manufacturer sends its price list in its own format, with its own part numbers and price breaks, often quarterly. The workflow reads every list, matches the lines to your items and transfers prices and price breaks into the ERP. Changes above a threshold you set, and new part numbers without a match, go to purchasing for review. The prices are processed, not sent to a third-party model.
Putting data in orderService -
Answering bill-of-materials enquiries
Email, Excel BOMs, ERP, availability, CRM
Customers send bills of materials with 50 to 500 lines, manufacturer part numbers in every conceivable spelling and a request for a quotation by Friday. The workflow normalises the part numbers, matches them to your items, checks stock and lead time and proposes alternatives for discontinued or non-stocked parts. The sales office receives a draft quotation with the gaps marked. Discounts and approvals stay with your people.
Tools that fit youService -
Routing enquiries and advising customers
Web form, shared inbox, CRM or ERP, knowledge base
Enquiries from all over Europe land in one inbox, while sales is organised by market and region. The workflow reads every enquiry, assigns market, country and urgency, and logs it in the system for the responsible team, with all the details. A knowledge base built from your data sheets and catalogues answers product questions on the website in the customer's language, with the source. When things get specific, it hands over to a person.
Sales and communicationService -
Processing discontinuations and change notices
Manufacturer emails, PCN and EOL notices, ERP order history, CRM
Manufacturers announce discontinuations and product changes by email or portal, often several a week and with long lists of parts. The workflow reads every notice, finds the affected items and all customers who have bought them in recent years, and proposes successor types. Sales receives, for each customer, a draft notification and the last-time-buy date. No customer hears from a competitor any more that their part is being phased out.
Sales and communicationService
Systems
Typical systems in distribution
The data is scattered: prices in the ERP, attributes in the PIM, the data sheet at the manufacturer. Zweite Schicht connects them.
- ERP and inventoryNetSuite, SAP S/4HANA and Business One, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage
- Product data and PIMAkeneo, Pimcore, Excel and CSV files
- Manufacturer dataETIM classification, BMEcat catalogues, manufacturer portals, PDF data sheets, PCN and EOL notices
- Shop and webShopware, Magento, WordPress, custom B2B portals with customer-specific prices
- CRM and salesSalesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
- CommunicationMicrosoft 365, Exchange, shared inboxes, web forms
Objections
What matters most in distribution
The objections distributors raise first, and our answers.
- Licences for manufacturer data. Manufacturer data and images may often be used only for certain channels; the workflow records the source for each field, so you can always see where a value comes from and where it may be used.
- Confidential price lists. Purchase prices and customer conditions need no language model for matching; they are processed with rules in your system and do not leave your company.
- Multiple languages. Texts are created with your technical glossary and go through a human review; editorially approved texts stay untouched, only what is new gets translated.
- Errors in technical values. A wrong voltage value in the shop costs more than a missing text; that is why every run checks units and value ranges before an attribute goes live, and logs every change.
- An item master that has grown over the years. The same manufacturer part number in three spellings is normal; putting data in order is therefore often the first workflow, with its own fixed price.
Evidence
A case from the industry: a distributor with twelve locations
A European technology distributor brings together eight specialised business units under one roof and sells through twelve European locations. For thousands of products, the manufacturer provided nothing but a PDF data sheet. Today, AI turns these into structured product data and texts, and a person checks them before they go live.
The advice service builds on this data: a knowledge base answers product questions in five languages, and every enquiry is routed by rules to the responsible regional team. Since the relaunch, enquiries from the website have risen by 400 percent.
Prices
Prices
Analysis, build and ongoing operation have fixed prices that are published on our website, and after each stage you decide again. The cost of a workflow such as importing price lists or answering bill-of-materials enquiries is set as a fixed price after the analysis: Approach and prices.
Handover
The first step is a 30-minute call.
You tell us about the workflow that costs you the most time. We tell you honestly whether AI pays off there and what the next step would be. Whether a workflow analysis follows is up to you.