Today’s technology leaders must deeply understand their organization’s financial health, from top-line revenue to net income. This financial literacy empowers IT to contribute meaningfully to the organization’s bottom line and to the success of any initiative.
Measuring the outcomes of IT projects is essential for building credibility. By demonstrating tangible results, technology leaders can secure support for future projects and gain a seat at the decision-making table.
It’s time to shift from a purely technical mindset to a business-focused approach. Focusing solely on operational tasks is no longer sufficient. IT must become a strategic partner that drives business growth.
For those unfamiliar with , we’re a 100% Canadian- and employee-owned retailer dedicated to serving farmers and ranchers with more than 90 stores across the country. We also operate a select number of Ace Hardware corporate stores and maintain a vast Ace Hardware Canada dealer network.
My role encompasses all aspects of technology at Peavey, from our IT infrastructure and service desk to business intelligence, application development, and cybersecurity. In early 2023, I also took on the expanding ecommerce business at Peavey, with P&L responsibility. Taking on this side of the business has been one of the most adapting moments in my career, and I’ve already lead growth in our sales through this channel by 7% YTD. I’m excited to see how much more we can grow this part of our business in the coming years.
Automating our way to efficiency: A supply chain transformation
I’d like to discuss our transformation journey with automation, both before and after the pandemic, focusing on its impact on our supply chain and internal processes. , we communicated clearly to all involved about the issue, the benefits of the solution (including reduced workload), and the new post-launch procedures. We aimed to prevent reverting to old methods and to establish the merchandising team as responsible for the new process by including them from the start. While challenges and setbacks are inevitable, early problem identification and consistent process assessments help minimize change-related difficulties.
We anticipate recovering well over a million dollars in margins once we fully implement BPA, a substantial figure that has captured the attention of our CEO and CFO. This success will serve as a catalyst for future automation initiatives.
Crawl, walk, run
A key lesson I’ve learned is to start small. Incremental improvements can lead to significant gains in efficiency. As employees — and management — witness these successes firsthand, they become more enthusiastic about automation’s potential. Our goal is to transform automation from a perceived threat to an opportunity for more strategic and impactful work.
This summer, we automated the freight bills process, leveraging Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence. We trained a model that can read specific freight bills and compare those bills against our rate cards and contracts to ensure we are being billed accurately and reliably. It’s standard in retail that 10-12% of bills are incorrectly invoiced. Our initial proof of concept workup revealed that one vendor overcharged us by $120k — enough to solidify this project’s success!
We are now on the cusp of migrating this proof of concept into production in the coming weeks. This new AI automation will save our company minimally $60-100K annually.
Next steps: The journey continues
Automation is an ongoing journey, but we’re excited about the possibilities. Our organization has embraced automation, and our employees and business leaders are becoming its strongest advocates.
We plan to build a center of excellence around automation. We are close to that tipping point as we continually provide value with each project we deploy. While we’ve just scratched the surface of automation, there are many more use cases within the existing functions we’ve talked about here, and the other business units are catching on. We get asked on a weekly basis if we can automate different processes business units identify as opportunities.
It really is endless. We don’t see automation as a threat to our employees, we see it as an opportunity for them to focus on higher-value tasks which in turn should either generate higher profitability or generate better ideas on how we can improve in other areas. When you lift the limitations on a person’s workload, it allows them to be more creative and strategic. And we always want more amazing ideas and engaged team members.
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