Case study | 7 mins read
For almost a decade now, the client, a global MRO and electronics distributor, has partnered with us to build what has become one of the most advanced market intelligence, inventory, content optimization and pricing ecosystems in the industry.
As it expanded across the APAC and EMEA regions, they were unable to keep pace with the hyper-regional data required to track competition and scale operations.
Almost ten years ago, eClerx was signed up for a competitor monitoring project. This evolved into a long-term relationship, and today, eClerx is helping the client build a more advanced market intelligence ecosystem to streamline complexity and improve decision-making, including tools to implement product launches and actions at speed and scale.
The challenge
With its expansion globally and acquisitions in recent years, it became a challenge to manage the sprawling vendor base and sell over 1 million SKUs across 40+ countries.
The client needed a constant flow of data to ensure the positioning in an increasingly crowded market. Existing vendors could not keep pace with the volume of data required and struggled with anti-bot blocking from competitor websites. Commercial teams were working with fragmented data, while category and market teams lacked visibility into local assortment gaps and margin opportunities.
Expansive data needs:
- Anti-scraping measures enforced by competitors meant limited data volumes
- Pricing teams worked with siloed data, while category and market teams lacked visibility
- Challenges in seeing assortment gaps and commercial opportunities
Limited information led to slow decision-making:
- Fragmented data limited agility of pricing, category, and market teams
- Impacted ability for organization to scale into new regions
Our strategy
eClerx’s collaboration began with competitive intelligence activities, scraping pricing and stock availability data and providing actionable insights to inform pricing decisions. As trust grew, the client moved on to explore other avenues of engagement with eClerx. They were looking for a strategic partner who could scale the adoption of insights across various business functions.
“We didn’t want another vendor. We wanted a partner who would challenge our thinking and help us stay ahead of competitors. They’ve consistently acted like an extension of our team — not just supplying data, but helping us turn it into intelligence for commercial actions.”
eClerx began to support the foundational discounting frameworks, segmentation, customer-specific pricing, assortment optimization at a category-market level to streamline high margin sales and inventory planning.
Over the next few years, eClerx’s Market Intelligence suite has helped the client identify bottlenecks and gaps within the existing process. We proposed a hybrid solution combining the domain experience of industry experts and AI solutions to help the client take advantage of regional opportunities faster and at scale:
1. Establish a competitive intelligence process:
Starting our engagement by scraping pricing and stock availability data, our team worked to first provide the actionable insights needed to inform pricing decisions. Revenue impacts of 7-10% incremental sales in Germany and the UK alone were realised within the first 3 months of model development, leading to localized, yet scalable, range curation playbooks to be created.
2. Moving from static insights to in-time action:
We introduced product-matching and standardization for CPQ (quotations and tenders), enabling integrated quotation decisions. This was seamlessly integrated via an API with the client’s pricing platform in EMEA and in North America, allowing pricing decisions to flow directly into their CPQ processes.
3. Introducing AI-powered market intelligence:
Boosted by strong ROI, the partnership further deepened as the client adopted our AI-powered matching, content collection, and enrichment technologies across its group product and supplier management, always complemented by category SMEs from the industry in our managed services model.
4. Greater expansion into North America and APAC regions:
Once proven successful in EMEA, our team expanded our solution to the client’s U.S and APAC operations to improve both product assortment curation and stock and pricing decisions. Feeding data into their dynamic pricing program for over 250,000 SKUs weekly, the client was now able to make overnight decisions in response to market movements and impacts of macroeconomic factors such as tariffs.
The results
The implementation of eClerx’s Market Intelligence solutions empowered the client’s category teams and market leads to act faster and with greater confidence, helping them optimize local price positioning, better identify assortment gaps, and improve negotiations with suppliers.
Throughout the partnership, we’ve delivered advanced pricing segmentation models, elasticity analysis, discount optimization, and data-driven assortment planning through our category assortment intelligence methodology. These analytics were delivered holistically as they were operationalized into the client’s workflows and pricing systems. Content effectiveness measurement and benchmarking has also complemented the commercial actions taken, and decisions around what customized, customer persona-specific content meets the needs of end customers across industries, given the diverse 20+ categories serviced worldwide.
The implementation of Market Intelligence solutions empowered category teams and market leads to act faster and with greater confidence, optimizing local price positioning, identifying assortment gaps, and informing negotiations with suppliers.
The client has reported the following results:
- 100M+ product records scraped and delivered each month
- 140+ competitor websites analyzed across EMEA, APAC, and U.S. regions
- Dynamic pricing provided for over 250,000 SKUs each week
- ~11% customer demand uplift for new category assortments
At the core of this relationship is the client’s trust in eClerx, and our ability to perform as a strategic partner. Unlike previous providers, we offered embedded consultative support at no extra cost, bringing cross-industry best practices and deep expertise in MRO pricing, assortment, merchandising, matching and commercial analytics. Our teams worked collaboratively, delivering data and dashboards as well as co-developing frameworks and operating models that were later embedded into the client’s internal systems.
“Their intelligence powers our daily pricing decisions across 250,000 products in just one of our 40+ global market alone. The result is millions in incremental margin every year. It’s not just insight. It’s actionable insight that has operational, measurable impact.”
Our capability with speed, scale, and consistent high-quality data sets us apart from and has enabled the client to operate with unmatched market awareness, where decisions leveraging big data decisions is business critical.
Conclusion
The partnership continues to evolve with the adoption of our enterprise Generative AI content ecosystem, working hand in hand with our Market Intelligence solutions. This next phase focuses on using Generative AI to accelerate product matching, improve scraping efficiency, and deliver faster, more proactive insights to commercial teams by country market. Our AI platform is now being used not just to automate processes, but to enhance decision-making, helping the client remain ahead of competitors in an increasingly dynamic digital marketplace.
“We partnered with eClerx to help us streamline our product offer, taking a data-driven approach to removing, adding, retaining and improving the assortment of SKUs based on demand. Their ability to quickly formulate an analytics framework to address the problem at hand, bringing data science and technology to develop a scalable solution, enabled our category teams to spend less time trawling through data, and more time strategizing their range mix according to customer needs.”
What began as a project focused on scraping competitor pricing has grown into a decade-long strategic alliance transforming how the client prices, competes, and grows globally. With a combination of technology, industry expertise, SME-led managed services, and innovation in AI, our partnership has delivered sustained commercial impact and set a new standard for data-driven decision-making in the MRO and distribution industry.
Featured insights
