HOW AUTOMATION BROKER FROM ITALY GOT EXTRA €2.5MLN REVENUE AND 500 NEW CUSTOMERS FROM 52 COUNTRIES VIA AUTOMA.NET

Hi guys!

I haven't been here for a while, but here I come with a brand new business case straight from my platform: Automa.Net

For those of you who don't know, Automa.Net is a B2B platform for industrial automation component selling & buying. We can help you source automation components as well as help you get new customers in your country and globally...

Today I would like to share with you an insightful business case that involves one of our SME automation distributors we work with - PLC-City from Naples, Italy. It provides a detailed understanding of the unique challenges we have overcome and the measurable results we have achieved in collaboration with our client.

I believe that this case study will give you a clear picture of what we do and how we can collectively drive growth in our industry.

ABOUT PLC-CITY

PLC-City is a global automation broker with a €50 million turnover and a team of 80 employees. Trading with more than 100 brands, it holds authorizations from Mitsubishi Electric and others. It deals with local brands too, selling both new and refurbished products. The strategy aims to cater to diverse customer requirements. With an inventory of over 17,000 parts. In short, PLC-City is an independent broker in the automation field with a varied brand portfolio and global operations.

THE CHALLENGE

PLC-City wanted a quicker and better way to check the stock availability of their current business partners and new distributors so that they could quicker serve their customers and provide a quote.

PLC-City operates in the industrial automation market where the number of products, brands, and component alternatives is extremely wide. Many of their business partners were providing inventory data to PLC-City in different formats and via different channels like FTP, webshop, online Excel or google sheets which were hard to handle because of lack of structure. The browsing of the data was even more complicated and clumsy as product conditions, brands, MPN and other data sets had different naming conventions and differs a lot across their supply chain network.?

The PLC-City team was also looking for an easy way to access the information from the market and get an easy way to find companies specializing in certain brands so that they could find new suppliers, widening their services and product offerings to better serve their customers.

SOLUTION

Automa.Net tackled PLC-City’s challenges by providing a single dashboard to manage diverse supplier inventories, ensuring uniformity across data sources. This improved the speed of stock checks.

The platform streamlined the handling of 140 product conditions, mapped to a standard 8, simplifying data filtering and navigation amidst an array of products, brands, and components. The team could easily locate specific parts from the 18 million daily offers using intelligent search and watchlist capabilities, enhancing response speed.

Automa.Net’s Request Board connected PLC-City with 3,500+ industry specialists, fostering relationships with new suppliers. The Special Offers feature showcased their competitive pricing and brand authorizations, aiming to increase customer engagement and sales.

THE RESULTS

PLC-City has a team of 30 users on Automa.Net who now have quick access to one dashboard where they can easily browse over 400 industrial distributors and their up-to-date inventory.

This new setup dramatically reduced the time needed to check stock availability and respond to customer inquiries.

The platform allowed incoming RFQs to be delivered in a unified format, simplifying the process of creating and sending quotations.

This efficiency meant the team could handle higher volumes of customer inquiries more effectively.