In recent years, Rexel China is committed to transforming itself into an automated service provider through digitalization. China has carried out in-depth development in this field, constantly upgrading the back office by digitalization so as to improve sales efficiency. The smart system “Rexel Ocean” launched in December 2022 is a digital tool aimed at improving sourcing efficiency.

This system collects a lot of data from the company’s ERP system, PIM, Rexel China online mall, cooperative websites and sourcing staff, and cleans up and integrates the data afterwards to ensure the uniqueness of materials and realize material association. Its goal is to operate and maintain a data sharing pool. Users can perform multi-dimensional queries in this pool, and will expand selection and intelligent retrieval in the future. Its operation platfor can interact with multiple systems, such as ERP system, Rexel China’s e-commerce platform, PIM, internal process automation platform, and can meet with the requirements of various business processes, such as quotation process, procurement process, quotation process, and data creation process. In the future, this platform will also expand the possibilities, such as business intelligence, develop supplier management & supplier analysis, supplier portal and customer portal, business AI analysis, data integration and so on.

Previously, when the company carried out sourcing work, it had been influenced by the disadvantages of one-time and offline manual operation. Weak in standardization, the process was difficult to ensure efficiency. After the launch of this new system, this situation will be changed.

With the sourcing system, sales can create their own requsts and make preliminary online engineering clarification, and those that cannot be clarified can be allocated to the engineering pool for further clarification. The engineers select the request, clarifie it online and feed it back to the sales. The clarified requests will be allocated to the sourcing pool for inquiry. After receiving the demand, the sourcing staff can edit the quotation information fed back by the supplier online, or export the request to send to the proper supplier. The quotation information fed back by the supplier can be imported back into the system. The supplier’s quotation information can be submitted to sales after confirmation. The sales then can submit the quotation to the customers. After the sales and customer are aligned, the request can be closed. If the customer decide to accept the quotation and lay the order, the information will be transferred into ERP system. The whole process of inquiry and order placement is recorded in the system and accumulated by the database.

The launch of “Rexel Ocean” will standardize the sourcing process of Rexel China, ensure the quality of sourcing, and quickly serve more external customers with demands.