Our Stories

Revolutionizing Sales Efficiency for MISUMI USA with an AI-Powered
BOM lookup Tool

Our client faced delays in manually processing diverse customer BOM files, which limited sales team capacity and led to missed opportunities, creating the need for an automated pre-sales solution.

CLIENT

MISUMI USA

INDUSTRY

Manufacturing & Industrial Supply

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The Challenge

Manual Processes in sales were Costing Time and Opportunities

MISUMI USA, a key player in the industrial supply sector, faced a significant operational bottleneck. Their sales teams were inundated with bill of material (BOM) files from customers, each with a different format and level of detail.

The process of manually identifying and looking up each part number across various internal and external sources was incredibly time-consuming and prone to error.

For large, complex BOMs, this manual effort could delay quotes by hours or even days. This not only placed a heavy administrative burden on the skilled sales team, preventing them from focusing on high-value activities, but it also directly resulted in lost business opportunities when they couldn't respond to customer inquiries fast enough.

The company needed a solution to automate and accelerate this critical pre-sales process.

The Solution

A Smart, Modular, and Scalable Lookup Engine

The Dots Connected partnered with MISUMI USA to build a custom Large BOM Lookup Tool, an intelligent platform designed to automate and streamline the entire process. Our approach was not just to build a piece of software, but to engineer a comprehensive, evolving solution.

Recognizing that the problem required a multi-faceted approach, we designed a modular architecture that could be iteratively improved and expanded over time. This ensures the tool remains a long-term asset that can adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

The core of the solution consists of several integrated modules working in concert:

Intuitive Web Application: A user-friendly front-end built with REACT that allows sales team members to simply copy and paste data directly from any Excel file. The application intelligently maps the columns (Part Number, Manufacturer, etc.), eliminating the need for manual data formatting.

Intelligent Search Orchestrator: This central module acts as the brain, receiving the BOM data and strategically dispatching search queries to various "engines" simultaneously. It optimizes the search process based on the type of data provided for each line item.

Multi-Engine Search Strategy: Instead of relying on a single source, the tool leverages multiple, independent search engines to maximize accuracy and coverage:

Internal Misumi DB Engine: Utilizes advanced fuzzy matching and AI-powered algorithms to find direct and similar matches within Misumi’s own extensive product database.

Competitor Search Engine: Automatically queries key competitor websites to identify products and gather crucial data to prepare better, data-backed offers for their customers

Google Search Engine: Uses the Google Search API to find product mentions online, analyzing top results for relevant matches. By presenting this information in a user-friendly interface, the tool improves part number management, allowing the team to locate and price obscure components without manual research.

BOM History Engine: This is the "learning" component. The tool stores all user-confirmed matches, creating an ever-growing internal knowledge base that makes future searches progressively faster and more accurate.

Advanced Scoring Module: Each search engine provides a confidence score for its findings. The scoring module then applies configurable weights to each result, presenting the user with a ranked list of the most probable matches. This allows MISUMI to fine-tune the system's logic over time based on real-world performance.

The Results

Turning Turnaround Time into a Competitive Advantage

The impact of the AI-Powered BOM Lookup Tool was immediate and transformative. By automating the complex cross-referencing process, MISUMI USA reduced the time required to process large quotes from days to minutes, directly recapturing business opportunities that were previously lost to competitors due to delays.

"We partnered with TDC as a team augmentation vendor to develop internal tools. They quickly gained a thorough understanding of our business and complex IT systems, consistently showcasing a strong problem-solving approach.

Today, TDC is a trusted technology partner, supporting us in major IT projects like ERP migration and e-commerce website upgrades."

Nick Crumlett

Sr. Director of Software Development

MISUMI USA

Beyond speed, the solution fundamentally shifted the sales team's focus. Liberated from the burden of manual data entry, representatives could redirect their energy toward high-value activities - building relationships and closing deals.

Furthermore, the system’s "learning" architecture turned a daily operational task into a compounding asset; with every search, the tool became smarter and more accurate, establishing a scalable data foundation for MISUMI’s future growth.