Candor Industrial Supply is a young distributor. It competes for the same large bids as much bigger distributors, but without a sourcing department.
Jesse Alfrey is Candor’s Business Development Manager. He works on new accounts, looks after existing ones and supports the sales team. When a prospect sends a list of a few hundred or a few thousand parts, Candor has a chance to win new business. The list also means hours of looking up parts, and that work falls on the same people who should be out seeing customers.
Candor calls getting those quotes out faster “speed to revenue.”
“If we have some tools that are pretty slick in our toolbox, then we can certainly play like the big boys.”
Business Development Manager
Candor Industrial Supply
Big bids. Small team.
The RFQs come in by email as a PDF or a spreadsheet, anywhere from 100 lines to over 1,000. The customer’s part numbers almost never match Candor’s. So before anyone could price anything, every line had to be looked up: read the description, find it in Candor’s system, check the vendor. Several minutes a line.
A 100-line list could take a couple of hours. A big bid meant telling the customer it would be a couple of weeks. Bigger distributors have sourcing departments to handle that work, and Candor doesn’t.
“We struggle to scale to these larger bids that come to us because we don’t have something that can help do the heavy lifting,” Jesse says.
Where the hours went
Candor doesn’t run every request through Boltwise. Requests for one or two lines were already quick, so the team still handles them the usual way. Large lists go to Boltwise.
Matched before anyone touches it
Boltwise reads the list and matches every line to Candor’s catalog in seconds. If the customer gave a part number, it checks Candor’s cross-references. If not, it works from the description, using Candor’s catalog and vendor data. Either way, the team starts with suggested matches instead of a blank spreadsheet.
Checking a match means looking at the manufacturer, the description and the specs. About 30 seconds a line. A 100-line list runs while Jesse works on something else, then takes a couple of minutes to review.
“For one person, three thousand line items would take forever,” Jesse says.
On a recent 3,000-line bid, Boltwise matched 70% of the lines.
Time to check each line
Before: Several minutes
Now: ~30 sec
Check the manufacturer, description and specs, then move to the next line.
Fix it once
When Boltwise picks the wrong part, the team picks the right one. They can save that fix, so the next time that part number comes in, it’s already matched. Candor asks everyone on the team to make these fixes, because each one makes the next list faster.
It’s not just fasteners. Boltwise has also started matching Candor’s MRO items.
Back on the road
Once Candor wins an account, customers want to know what Candor is doing with their purchasing data. Jesse now has time to meet with them and review KPIs.
He and the team also spend more time visiting customers and less time looking up parts at a desk.
A customer asked about AI
One of the customers behind much of Candor’s growth asked directly how Candor was investing in AI and other technology. That customer was spending more with Candor and wanted to know its supplier could keep up.
Candor walked them through how it now quotes with Boltwise.
“We want them to know that we are investing in our business, which in turn reinvests into their business and benefits them,” Jesse says.
Tested on real RFQs
Jesse first saw Boltwise at a fastener fair in Los Angeles. Candor doesn’t buy software based on a trade show demo. He wanted to know if it would work with Candor’s data and how much of the team’s time it would take.
Candor found out by running real RFQs through Boltwise and checking the results. The team was skeptical at first (“Another technology?”), so leadership explained the reason for the change: faster quotes and more time with customers.
“It didn’t happen overnight,” Jesse says. “But people have come around to it, and we’re excited for it.”
Try it on your own data
Jesse’s advice to other distributors is to talk with Boltwise, start with a small test and see how it handles your own data. “Don’t walk away thinking it can’t do anything without at least investigating what its potential is,” he says.
Asked what his team would miss most if Boltwise went away, Jesse said the time. They’d be back to looking up every line by hand.
“If we had to go backwards,” he says, “that’s why I don’t want to think about it.”