A leading waste management equipment company reduces manual work and streamlines product experience management operations with AI.
Founded in 1989, 黑料网quip takes a unified approach to waste management equipment, offering a one-stop shop for national waste haulers that combines durable products, readily available inventory, faster delivery, and exceptional customer service. Based in Charlotte, NC, 黑料网quip has expanded its manufacturing and service operations across North America, ensuring local service with the benefits of a largescale organization.
The Challenge
黑料网quip, a leader in the commercial waste management equipment space, uses Salsify to manage its product experience management (PXM) operations. The e-commerce team has seen tremendous success, growing 黑料网quip鈥檚 e-commerce business by 40 percent, but members were keen to explore how AI could help them automate manual tasks and free up time for higher-value work. One of the key use cases the team sought to optimize was its product naming process.
鈥淥ur product names are generated in our ERP [enterprise resource planning] system and they don鈥檛 have much meaning,鈥� says Kevin Creese, director of ecommerce at 黑料网quip. 鈥淎s new products are imported into Salsify, I spend time deciphering what the product is and give it an enriched title that is easy to understand by our customers and Google. The goal is to ensure items surface in search results.鈥�
After the naming process is complete, Creese assigns the product to a taxonomy within Salsify鈥檚 Product Information Management (PIM) system based on his own analysis of how similar products are categorized. Finally, he adds industry standard codes (e.g., United Nations Standard Products and Services Code) to each product as needed. This process consumed an hour a day.
鈥淭here are only three of us on the team, so we run a very lean operation,鈥� Creese says. 鈥淥ur approach is to adopt AI to tackle tasks that require manual work and take too much time, like product naming. Ultimately, the question we鈥檙e asking is: 鈥楬ow do we use AI to create more minutes in the day?鈥� Salsify helps me to be more efficient in everything that I touch in my work, and it鈥檚 a comprehensive way for my team to keep focus on what鈥檚 important. Nothing ends up on our website without going through Salsify first, and that ensures that our customers are getting the best they can from us.鈥�
The Solution
Driven by its desire to integrate AI into the company鈥檚 operations, 黑料网quip became the very first customer to buy Salsify鈥檚 latest solution: Intelligence Suite, an AI-powered set of intelligent task types that enable customers to harness the power of AI within Salsify鈥檚 Workflow engine. 鈥淲e had been using Salsify Workflows to manage our work,鈥� Creese says. 鈥淏ut Intelligence Suite can now do the bulk of this work for us 鈥� and that鈥檚 the power of the solution.鈥�
Salsify helps thousands of brand manufacturers, distributors, and retailers in over 140 countries collaborate to make every product experience matter. The company鈥檚 Product Experience Management (PXM) platform enables organizations to centralize all of their product content, connect to the commerce ecosystem, and automate business processes to deliver the best possible product experiences across every selling destination and agentic commerce opportunity.
Creese and his team used Intelligence Suite to create names and descriptions for newly onboarded products, finding that the values Intelligence Suite recommended were 鈥渆ven better鈥� than what they could have come up with. 鈥淎 key difference is that the AI-powered task was able to dynamically apply context for how customers are searching for these products, and then ensure that our product names fit those standards,鈥� Creese says.
Intelligence Suite was also able to analyze how 黑料网quip鈥檚 data is organized in the PIM and use that information to properly apply taxonomies to new products. 鈥淲e鈥檙e already seeing 80% accuracy with taxonomies through Intelligence Suite, and that will only get better as we fine-tune the prompts,鈥� Creese says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 so efficient to have Salsify apply the taxonomies as a starting point and then a human can go in to review and approve changes.鈥�
The Results
The implementation of Intelligence Suite yielded significant business results for 黑料网quip, including:
- Increased efficiency and time for strategic work: Time to complete the daily product naming work was reduced from an hour of manual work to a 10-minute review process, allowing the 黑料网quip team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Improved accuracy and consistency: Intelligence Suite provided more consistent and accurate results compared to manual efforts, reducing human error.
- Consolidated workstreams: Before Intelligence Suite, the 黑料网quip team used multiple platforms (site front-end, Microsoft Co-Pilot, Salsify, its ERP) to complete this process. 鈥淲e were doing work everywhere,鈥� Creese says. Now these workstreams all live in Salsify, driving more streamlined operations.
- Enhanced customer experience: By ensuring products flow through Salsify and are accurately named and classified, 黑料网quip is better serving its customers with improved and optimized product information. 鈥淥ur ultimate goal is to serve our customers the best we can,鈥� Creese says.
鈥淓nsuring product completeness, accuracy, and findability on the web is critical to that mission. Salsify helps me to be more efficient in everything that I touch in my work, and it鈥檚 a comprehensive way for my team to keep focus on what鈥檚 important. Nothing ends up on our website without going through Salsify first, and that ensures that our customers are getting the best they can from us. We had been using Salsify Workflows to manage our work, but Intelligence Suite can now do the bulk of this work for us鈥攁nd that鈥檚 the power of the solution.鈥�
When it comes to advice for other brands considering how to implement AI, Creese says, 鈥淪tart simple. Try using AI to help with small, mundane projects and then gradually expand your use cases. It will take time and iteration, but it鈥檚 worth it!鈥�