With increasing demands comes the increasing need to have the right parts and products both quickly and easily. After years of work, the National Association of Electrical Distributors and DATAgility have completed the X-Check Expansion Project, which will meet those demands much faster.
The association and DATAgility made an investment in the program, which will first help with product relationships, much like you would see if you were shopping on an online giant’s platform, like Amazon. Often times when shopping on Amazon, you will have the option to purchase items that other users bought when they bought the item you selected. As Denise Keating, CEO of DATAgility points out, oftentimes on Amazon’s B2B website Amazon Business, those relationships don’t always match correctly. The X-Check Expansion Project is made specifically for our supply chain, so the relationships are checked and correct.
Denise Keating, CEO of DATAgility, explains to the crowd at the NAED Eastern Regional Conference how the X-Check Expansion Project will help their customers.
“We need to bring back those product relationships,” Keating said during the NAED Eastern Regional Conference in Tampa. “We have to be smarter about how we serve our customers” Keating says the expansion not only works for products, but also other things to keep your customers working efficiently on a job site. “If you have a part that you are installing in a system, but it needs a specialty tool, you can advise that customer that the tool is needed in the online offering. We have subject matter experts on our team, so we know the product relationships. We go to the professionals and they give us their real-life experience.”
In addition to the bundling, the X-Check Expansion Project will also help customers find replacements for obsolete products that are no longer being made. The online offering will provide product numbers and manufacturers for products that are no longer made. This will allow customers the chance to quickly find the replacement parts while they are on your website, instead of taking the time to search multiple websites for the information. Keating announced an advisory council is helping DATAgility to influence manufacturers to provide and update the information that goes into the expansion project. There are already more than 400,000 SKUs, and more will be added as necessary. “We will give you the data, but how you leverage it will give you the competitive advantage,” Keating announced. “We are working with manufacturers to take their print catalog and turn it into what we call ‘digital copy’. This will improve the distributor’s website data.”
Keating explained that the X-Check Expansion Project can be broken down into six areas to help people visiting your website find everything they need.
- Accessories: products that can be sold to make the core product more useful
- Supersessions: Obsolete parts tied to new parts
- Obsolete: Products no longer made
- Upgrades: Get/better/best and upgrade relationships
- Related products: Products sold together
- Similar products: Products within a group that have more than one variant that have the same function
The program is live and available right now. You can contact the NAED Member Engagement Team or DATAgility if you have questions or you are interested in using the project.
Also, a seven-part introductory series of videos can be found here on tEDTV: https://tedtv.tedmag.com/tedtv/video/NAED-X-Check-Part-1-The-Value-of-a-Cross-Reference-Tool.aspx
Tagged with DATAgility, NAED, X-Check