Saving 9K hours annually through automation and AI allows Endries to scale its business

Transforming the workforce so that computers focus on computer work and people can focus on people work

Endries provides supply chain solutions to OEM manufacturers across various sectors such as industrial and agricultural equipment, commercial and residential refrigeration, and HVAC. With a vast database of over 750,000 SKUs covering fasteners and related products, Endries is committed to delivering the right components at the right price and time to manufacturing production lines.

Experiencing significant growth over the past three years, Endries recognizes the challenge of scaling its workforce alongside expanding customer demands. Therefore, the company's strategy focuses on leveraging automation to handle tasks traditionally requiring human intervention. This approach allows employees more time for customer engagement.

“We're very focused on this notion of having computers do computer work so people can do people work. Our aim isn't to replace people but to enhance scalability for our business. In a competitive labor market, our growth in customer numbers outpaces our ability to hire. Over the past three years, we've achieved a decade's worth of growth, and our collaboration with Infor ensures we sustain this momentum for future expansion.”

– Michael Knight, CEO at Endries International.

Key areas identified for automation include search and analysis processes, which consumed thousands of man-hours annually. Tasks such as searching for and identifying part matches within an increasingly large item master database were both time-consuming and prone to errors. Additionally, the manual tracking and searching for customer documents dispersed throughout the organization posed further inefficiencies and frustrations for both employees and customers alike.

By addressing these challenges through technology, Endries aims to enhance overall customer and employee satisfaction, ensuring streamlined operations and more personalized customer interactions.

Parts matching impacts all areas of the business

Each year, Endries conducts over 150,000 keyword searches to match parts for sales inquiries, RFQs, and database parts merging. Traditionally, depending on the expertise level, a single search could yield a lengthy list of potential matches due to the diverse terminology used by customers and vendors to describe over 60 attributes of fasteners. This process often took up to 30 minutes per search to refine and accurately identify matches, sometimes resulting in incorrect or no matches at all. These inefficiencies led to revenue loss, dissatisfied customers, and increased inventory and labor costs.

Implementing Infor Industry AI for part matching has significantly enhanced productivity and accuracy across Sales, Procurement, Operations, and Inventory departments, benefiting over 500 users. AI-driven parts matching eliminates the need for specialized skills because the model is trained to interpret various abbreviations and prioritize them, thereby generating shorter and more precise lists of part matches. Accessible via an intranet widget, AI-driven parts matching now delivers the following advantages:

• 50-65% faster time to match a part
• 1000 bulk part matching results in seconds
• 30% increase in customer win rates
• 7,500 hours saved annually in part matching
• 100% project completion rates for parts consolidation
• Less than 90 days time to value to implement AI

These improvements not only streamline operations but also contribute to enhanced customer satisfaction and reduced operational costs for Endries.

Accelerated part matching with AI bulk processing

Before adopting AI technology, completing a 500-part quote for an RFQ at Endries required at least three days. With the implementation of Infor AI, this timeframe has been reduced to just one day, enabling Endries to engage with customers sooner and deliver more tailored, high-quality quotes, thus enhancing their chances of winning bids. For instance, Infor AI can swiftly process a batch of 500-part descriptions and promptly generate a comprehensive list of matches for each part.

"What's truly transformative is AI's ability to handle hundreds of parts in a single request. Previously, imagine the time it took to compile a quote with hundreds of lines of part descriptions, conducting searches one by one. With AI, users simply upload a spreadsheet, and AI efficiently provides top matches for each part, saving time and expediting the entire process." – says Todd Fischer, VP and Corporate Information Officer.

Over recent years, Endries has acquired 12 companies, each necessitating the matching and consolidation of up to 50,000 parts within its item master database. Prior to adopting AI, this was a daunting task for employees, often stretching over months to complete. Resource limitations frequently resulted in incomplete projects, leading to the accumulation of duplicate parts over time. With AI-powered bulk processing capabilities, Endries now efficiently completes these projects, ensuring thorough database consolidation and eliminating duplicates for a cleaner item master database going forward.

ROI in under 90 days with Infor Augmented Intelligence Service

Endries currently operates as a hybrid IT organization, nearing a full migration of its ERP system from on-premises Infor Sx.e to Infor CloudSuite Distribution, expected in the coming months.

“Over time, we've heavily modified our ERP with a team of people who know how to code to suit our needs but also making if painful to upgrade because the base core ERP code is much different than our code. Once we are fully cloud mulit-tenant, we get the extensibility we need to get out of that that custom code business.” - says Fischer.

With Endries resources focused on cloud migration, there was limited capacity to dedicate to innovation. Specifically, the company does not employ expert data engineers, data analysts, or data scientists to explore and implement AI solutions within their operations.

Fortunately, Infor AI supports a hybrid environment and offers a subscription service promising ROI in less than 90 days. Infor's Augmented Intelligence Service (AIS) provides a dedicated project team to organizations, tasked with developing, deploying, and maintaining AI solutions. This expert team has collaborated closely with Endries, initially addressing their Parts Matching use case and subsequently devising a roadmap to expand AI capabilities to calculate part costing and delivery times, enabling almost instant quotes. Rapid response times are critical for Endries' customer satisfaction, and they are eager to leverage Infor Industry AI solutions to differentiate their business moving forward.

"We don't have data scientists on our payroll. When we have an idea, we engage with Infor's data scientists through our subscription. They develop solutions for our use cases promptly, allowing us to test new concepts rapidly. The potential is immense, as each successful implementation leads to new ideas. We have a core set of projects in progress with Infor and a robust pipeline beyond that. It's an incredibly exciting time for us." – says Knight.

Sustaining Business Growth with RPA Bot Expansion

“We want to free up our people so they can focus on our customers, not mundane tasks. Our employees seek more fulfilling work, and RPA is taking us down that path. I am amazed at how people are embracing RPA and eagerly giving us projects to do to the point where now have a queue.” – says Fischer. 

Endries recognized the immediate value of RPA and took advantage of pre-built Infor Value+ solutions, such as Proof of Delivery (PoD) Digitization to transform the management of PoD documents. Employees and customers were frustrated with the time it took to locate a PoD paper document in filing cabinets, especially when multiple orders were in one document, complicating the filing process by order number. Documents were also occasionally lost or filed incorrectly which resulted in even a greater amount of time to resolve a customer inquiry.

With the RPA process, a picture of the document is emailed to an inbox where RPA picks it up, extracts the metadata, and files it away in Infor Document Management (IDM) for instantaneous access when searching by order, customer, or part number. This is possible because Infor RPA creates bot processes scheduled or unscheduled to digitize and centralize documents in IDM leveraging optical character recognition (OCR), sophisticated document analysis, text processing, and AI/ML extraction activities.

With approximately 5200 PoD documents collected each year, Infor Value+ provides a more efficient, RPA based solution to manage PoD documents:

• 50% productivity improvement in filing documents
• 96% faster document retrieval for customer inquires

Additionally, Endries will not have to dedicate resources to digitize, process, and manage these documents. This would save Endries approximately 260 hours annually dedicating employee time to handle this task.

Thanks to the user-friendly nature of the tool, Endries also developed their own RPA flow for Inventory Commitment Form (ICF) management. ICFs are contracts for Endries to provide product coverage for a customer, who then fulfills the commitment within an agreed timeframe. With approximately 20% of ICFs still open after expiration, Endries faced uncommitted inventory costing millions of dollars. Customers were unhappy as delayed follow-ups often resulted in budget issues for inventory payment and obsolete stock.

Before implementing RPA, ICFs were stored on computers or in filing cabinets, lacking a triggering mechanism for timely customer follow-ups. Most documents were not linked to part numbers, making it difficult for purchasing to locate and verify order requests. The RPA process for ICFs automatically captures metadata, such as expiration date, and files it in IDM for subsequent access when sales is notified that a customer touchpoint is needed and when procurement needs to verify an order against an ICF contract. This streamlined and automated process not only increases customer satisfaction but also saves Endries time and money:

• 100% closed commitments save millions in inventory costs
• 1,200 hours saved annually in managing ICF documents
• Less than one month time to value

Single vendor, single platform for innovation

What prevented Endries from using technology to innovate and automate before? Too many vendors to work drives up costs and risk. Now, with a hybrid configuration, the Infor OS Platform provides that bridge to facilitate the speed of innovation until Endries fully migrates to the cloud. This offers Endries minimal risk in taking advantage of a full suite of solutions Infor has engineered with the latest, cutting-edge AWS technology.

“When we started looking at different solutions, you had to buy multiple solutions and try to bolt them into the system. The great thing about the Infor OS Platform is that all the capabilities work together. The result is speed of innovation.” – says Fischer.

Beyond a distribution company, Endries prides itself on being a solution provider, with its people as key differentiators. The longevity of Endries employees is closely tied to our customer retention. With ongoing success using the Infor OS platform to scale the business and meet customer demands, Endries is confident that employees will continue to stay with the company and hence retain customers longer.

Knight concludes, “It was hard for me to imagine being a cheerleader for my ERP platform. If you've ever built a house or know someone who’s built a house, it's very rare after the project where you're still on speaking terms with the builder. We are big fans of Infor – company and the people. That's not something you can say about other ERP vendors which I've had experience with.”