Industrial supplies distributor Packer Fastener is accelerating its digital strategy after working with TitletownTech and the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence (AI) Co-Innovation Lab.
Together, they’re building an automated quoting and ordering tool to reduce manual work and speed up response times for customers. During its time in the lab, the company, based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, collaborated with technical specialists to develop software that automatically reads and interprets customer requests, extracts key details and matches them to the correct stock-keeping units (SKUs) in Packer Fastener’s system.
Packer Fastener designed the tool to automate as much as 75% of quote transactions once they released it before the end of the year, the company said.
How Packer Fastener is saving time with an AI quoting tool
Executives said they expected efficiency gains of about 40 hours of labor saved each month. The gains will allow teams to respond more quickly to customer needs, scale more easily during periods of growth and cut down on issues such as duplicate inventory. The company also expects the tool to help train new employees faster. Because the system profiles customer preferences, its recommendations will improve over time.
“Working with TitletownTech and participating in the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Co-Innovation Lab is a unique and exciting opportunity for us to explore AI in a meaningful way,” said Bill Feck, director of information technology at Packer Fastener. “We’re always looking for ways to move faster, serve better, and push ourselves to improve.”
The distributor sees the project as the first step in a longer-term plan to embed AI across its operations. Packer Fastener says it will build additional automation and analytics use cases using the expertise and relationships formed through the Co-Innovation Lab, which works with Wisconsin businesses to deploy high-value artificial intelligence applications.
Packer Fastener supplies threaded fasteners, abrasives, safety equipment, welding products and other industrial goods. It distributed to maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) teams, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), commercial contractors and fabricators nationwide. The company also offers ecommerce tools, vendor-managed inventory programs and on-site vending solutions.
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