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Wolseley Chooses Open ECX to enhance flexible technical integration & to support during peak times.
 

The Business:
UK's

Wolseley is the UK’s largest specialist merchant in plumbing, heating, and cooling products, supplying a wide range of goods to customers across the domestic, commercial, and industrial sectors.

With over 560 branches nationwide, Wolseley is committed to delivering exceptional service and operational efficiency. As the business continued to scale, it recognised the need to diversify its order processing operations across internal teams and the wider supply chain to enhance speed, accuracy, and the overall customer experience.

 

The Requirements:
Improving Order Processing 

Wolseley offers multiple ordering channels, including its website, a suite of in-house APIs, and traditional EDI systems. However, some of their customers either lacked the technical infrastructure to integrate directly or relied on systems that couldn’t easily connect to Wolseley’s platforms. These customers often produced standardised purchase orders but had no way of submitting them automatically.

To bridge this gap, Wolseley partnered with Open ECX. The solution captures purchase orders from these non-integrated customers, converts them into Wolseley’s internal format, and feeds them directly into its systems, removing the need for double entry and manual data capture. This has significantly accelerated processing times and reduced the risk of errors within these orders.

Today, approximately 20% of Wolseley’s orders are processed digitally, while the remaining 80% still come through manual channels. The integration with Open ECX supports Wolseley’s ambition to grow digital ordering by offering a simple and effective route for customers without technical capabilities to automate their transactions.

By automating some of our most time-consuming and repetitive manual orders, we were able to increase one team’s throughput by 30%—without needing to increase headcount. That kind of efficiency gain doesn’t just improve our operations; it frees up our people to focus on higher-value customer service.
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The Solution:
End to End ordering Automation

Following the successful integration into Wolseley’s systems, Open ECX started automating some of the complex, high-volume transactions and eliminating time-consuming manual processes. By identifying the specific use cases where the Open ECX technology could be implemented, Wolseley was able to increase accuracy, reduce operational strain, and enhance service delivery. These use cases are:

Support During Peak: 

Wolseley experiences sharp increases in order volumes during colder months, particularly at the start of the heating season. Open ECX’s automated solution has transformed how Wolseley handles these seasonal surges. Large, multi-line orders that once took hours to process are now handled in seconds, allowing staff to focus on service and exception management rather than data entry. 

This has proven especially valuable during peak periods when additional headcount would otherwise be required. With Open ECX, Wolseley is able to flexibly scale operations without the time and cost of recruiting and onboarding temporary staff, ensuring consistent service quality 
year-round.  

 

Significant Time Savings:

The efficiencies introduced through Open ECX have delivered significant time savings, with many orders large and complex, sometimes containing 80 or more line items. Manually inputting these orders is time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale.  

By removing manual entry for thousands of complex orders, the solution has not only improved speed and accuracy but also supported better service levels for customers operating under strict SLAs.  

Specialist support teams, set up to centralise service for key accounts, have seen the most improvements. Orders that were once handled across up to 100 different branches can now be processed centrally, with automation ensuring accuracy and consistency.   

 

 

 

One of the standout benefits of working with Open ECX is how flexible they’ve been. Rather than forcing us into a rigid integration, they worked with our middleware and transitioned from SFTP to our APIs. That move alone saved around 15 minutes per order—and helped us modernise without disrupting our existing infrastructure.”
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The Results:
Improving Order Processing with Open ECX

Wolseley offers multiple ordering channels, including its website, a suite of in-house APIs, and traditional EDI systems. However, some of their customers either lacked the technical infrastructure to integrate directly or relied on systems that couldn’t easily connect to Wolseley’s platforms. These customers often produced standardised purchase orders but had no way of submitting them automatically.  

To bridge this gap, Wolseley partnered with Open ECX. The solution captures purchase orders from these non-integrated customers, converts them into Wolseley’s internal format, and feeds them directly into its systems, removing the need for double entry and manual data capture. This has significantly accelerated processing times and reduced the risk of errors within these orders.  

Today, approximately 20% of Wolseley’s orders are processed digitally, while the remaining 80% still come through manual channels. The integration with Open ECX supports Wolseley’s ambition to grow digital ordering by offering a simple and effective route for customers without technical capabilities to automate their transactions.  

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