Business case PLC-City
PLC-City – Industrial Automation Broker:
How PLC-City improved its customer service and increased its global presence in the automation distribution sector?
ABOUT PLC-CITY
PLC-City is a global automation broker with a €50 million turnover and a team of 80 employees. Trading with more than 100 brands, it holds authorizations from Mitsubishi Electric and others. It deals with local brands too, selling both new and refurbished products. The strategy aims to cater to diverse customer requirements. With an inventory of over 17.000 parts. In short, PLC-City is an independent broker in the automation field with a varied brand portfolio and global operations.
THE CHALLENGE
PLC-City wanted a quicker and better way to check the stock availability of their current business partners and new distributors so that they could quicker serve their customers and provide a quote.
PLC-City operates in the industrial automation market where the number of products, brands, and component alternatives is extremely wide. Many of their business partners were providing inventory data to PLC-City in different formats and via different channels like FTP, webshop, online Excel or google sheets which were hard to handle because of lack of structure. The browsing of the data was even more complicated and clumsy as product conditions, brands, MPN and other data sets had different naming conventions and differs a lot across their supply chain network.
The PLC-City team was also looking for an easy way to access the information from the market and get an easy way to find companies specializing in certain brands so that they could find new suppliers, widening their services and product offering to better serve their customers.
SOLUTION
Automa.Net B2B Platform with integration capabilities
Automa.Net tackled PLC-City’s challenges by providing a single dashboard to manage diverse supplier inventories, ensuring uniformity across data sources. This improved the speed of stock checks.
The platform streamlined the handling of 140 product conditions, mapped to a standard 8, simplifying data filtering and navigation amidst an array of products, brands, and components. The team could easily locate specific parts from the 18 million daily offers using intelligent search and watchlist capabilities, enhancing response speed.
Automa.Net’s Request Board connected PLC-City with 3,500+ industry specialists, fostering relationships with new suppliers. The Special Offers feature showcased their competitive pricing and brand authorizations, aiming to increase customer engagement and sales.
THE RESULTS
PLC-City has a team of 30 users
on Automa.Net who now have
quick access to one dashboard
where they can easily browse
over 400 industrial distributors
and their up-to-date inventory.
This new setup dramatically reduced
the time needed to check stock
availability and response to customer
inquiries.
The platform allowed incoming
RFQs to be delivered in a unified
format, simplifying the process of
creating and sending quotations.
This efficiency meant the team
could handle higher volumes
of customer inquiries more
effectively.
With improved efficiency and capabilities, PLC-City can now better serve its customers and continue to grow its global presence in the automation distribution sector.