A new system has been developed which suggests an alternative product when the customer’s preferred option is unavailable.
The plan is to potentially develop it further to suggest second and third alternatives and to put forward alternatives to competitor products to help with breaking specifications.
The project is being led by Ali Tilsley, with the product list developed by Mike Smelt, Chris Bennett and John Lynam, along with Ade Olsen and Matt Brown in the Master Data Team, who have loaded the initial files onto SAP and Salesforce.
Mike said: “Like the majority of businesses globally at the moment, we are having issues with stock availability because our plants were shut at the height of the pandemic and the same goes for many of our suppliers.
“The idea with the alternatives system is to enable sales and order fulfilment teams to put forward a similar product to a customer where their preferred option isn’t immediately available.
“This could be a Concept Air washbasin instead of a Concept washbasin or a Ceraflex basin mixer instead of a Tempo slim basin mixer.
“The aim is obviously to retain a specification or, in future, to break a specification when a customer comes to us when a competitor is having stock issues.”
We are currently loading the data into our central SAP system and training will be deployed to Order Fulfilment teams during November.
Further development is in progress to integrate with the Salesforce platform for our sales teams to access a single point of product intelligence, enabling an agile customer response for both supply constraints and taking share opportunity.
The project is in transition between the development of base systems and embedding as business as usual.